Ainoshima Island

This guide to Ainoshima Island in Fukuoka traces how fishing families here started bringing cats aboard their boats generations ago, to guard nets and stores from rats after every catch. It follows the island's rise to a bustling fishing community with its own school, and the slow decline that closed that school in 1976 as the young left for the mainland. You'll hear how an unwatched handful of cats settled into the emptying harbor over the decades that followed. Look for them still curled across the fish-drying racks near the port.