conversations with Beppu cats

View from my hotel window

Three different tabby's in central Beppu. The bottom photo is outside the Beppu Projects Office.

After living in a flat where you couldn’t open the windows for 10 weeks, it was an unbelieve joy to get to a hotel where you could open the window wide. Better still that it was a barmy humid Beppu in Kyushu.

One of the side effects of having the windows open means you hear the city. After 10 weeks with the drone of air conditioning and police sirens being the wallpaper sound scape (sirens being the only sound that cut through from outside), I thrilled to lie in bed and drift off to sleep to the sound of cats scrapping and tomcats wailing. It seems like a rare sound scape to me- the last time I remember hearing the sounds of stray cats like this would have been in Barcelona (10 years ago). Although there are stray cats in Marrickville, it’s not really a sound I hear much at home. I spent a couple of night and morning hanging out the window with my microphones recording their yowls echoing up from the walls below.

As you can see from the pictures above, most of the cats seemed to be tabby’s, I only saw one ginger tom- white with ginger patches. He was very large with lots of battle scares on his face.