I have written before about Hiroko, who made my lovely embroidered Hili Shirt, and I recently noted that she has published a book about the shirts. That book, Neko Shirt, recently arrived in the mail, along with lagniappe of a bag of miniature Japanese green tea Oreo cookies (the cream filling is flavored with matcha tea, and the cookies were fantastic)! My gift from Hiroko: 
Here is the book’s table of contents; note that there are instructions about how to make a neko (Japanese for “cat”) shirt, though you won’t be able to do it without Hiroko’s formidable skills. (All photos below save the one showing Kit Kats are from her book.) 
Here are the cute graphic instructions about how to get a cat shirt. 1. Order. 2. Measure your shirt size. 3. Send photo of cat. 4. Cat shirt is made. 5. Exchange information (send check!). 5. CAT SHIRT ARRIVES! 
Here is the list of stories about customers and their Neko shirts. You can see that many non-Japanese people ordered them. Professor Ceiling Cat (with Hili) is on the left page, top row, middle. Clearly many people had their own cat embroidered on their shirt, and posed proudly with both moggie and matching shirt: 
My page! I’m sure it’s too small for any Japanese-reading readers to translate, but I’d love to know what it says. 
A Russian woman with her cat and cat shirt (from article mentioned below). You can see from her mantel that she’s a cat fanatic. 
This is one of Hiroko’s sons, who started the whole kerfuffle when he asked his mom to make a cat shirt, and she posted the picture on a Flickr page: 
And here is the great lady herself, busy embroidering. Hiroko is still making shirts, but you’ll have to wait three years to get one! 
This is the only place I could stick this photo. This is a bag of Japanese green tea Kit Kat bars that I ordered from Amazon because a reader recommended them. They are “awesome”! Green tea flavoring, which comes from matcha tea powder, is a much underrated addition to sweets (green tea ice cream is a great treat). And I love the tea itself, which is very healthy and rich in antioxidants (not so healthy in Kit Kats, though). 
There’s an article in English about Hiroko’s shirts in The Asahi Shimbun newspaper, “Paws for thought.” It includes, among other things, this:
The hoopla started in 2013 after Hiroko posted a picture on the Flickr photo-sharing site of a “cat shirt” she created upon the request of her college-age second son. Hiroko, who asked to be identified by only her first name, soon found around 100 e-mails in her inbox. “I thought my computer might have been infected by a strange virus,” she recalled. Most of the e-mail senders were foreigners who had seen the photo on Flickr. After repeatedly rejecting requests for orders, Hiroko was moved by a British man’s sincere message about wanting to give a similar shirt to his cat-loving fiancee. Since then, the Kashihara homemaker has produced and shipped about 130 shirts, priced around 35,000 yen ($283) each. She estimates that more than 70 percent of her customers live in foreign countries, such as those around Asia, the United States, Russia and Saudi Arabia. Hiroko, a mother of five from high-school to graduate school age, often has to consult a dictionary to reply to e-mails in English. Although she has made clothes for her children since they were small, she became self-taught in embroidery only 10 years ago. After the morning chores are over around 8 a.m., she works on the embroidery for up to five hours a day. Depending on the cat species, she uses as many as 40 different colors of thread, and she can complete one shirt in about a week.
And ME! This refers to the New Yorker Cats vs. Dogs debate, where I wore the shirt and did reveal it when I was about to speak. It failed to intimidate the opponents. . .
One client named Jerry Coyne, a professor in the United States, ordered a shirt to wear at a debate about whether cats or dogs are the best pet. According to the e-mail, Jerry wanted to take off a jacket and show off the cat-designed shirt to the opponent. The Yaesu Book Center’s main store in Tokyo’s Chuo Ward is holding an exhibition through July 6 of about 20 panels of embroidered cats and a shirt Hiroko created featuring the cat on the book’s cover. The book is priced at 1,404 yen. Hiroko is currently not accepting orders, but she will for a limited time each year. Her shirts can be seen at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/hiroko-and-5/
I’ve also posted pictures of Hiroko’s work, which you can see here.
A wonderful story.
My Coco Chanel would be relatively easy for Hiroko. She is a solid chocolate color. Except for her eyes of course.
So a guy from Chicago and a cat from Poland team up and become famous in a book from a lady in Japan. Pretty good story.
When I was working in Okinawa for five years, one of our very good employees was a lady from Fukioku named Hiroko. She was excellent in speaking and writing both English and Japanese and often served as a translator on legal matters.
Sorry – I’ll never be translating anything. It’s spelled Fukuoka.
I love the smell of matcha in the morning.
Here’s the first paragraph. Parts of the rest of it are a little out of focus and harder to read, but given a little more time I think I could manage.
When an email address has .edu in it, it’s often from someone who’s associated with some sort of school. I’d already received an email like that from a student, so when I asked “Are you a student?” I got the reply, “I’m a professor.”
I’ll try squinting and reading it when I have more time, but at a quick glance, the bottom-left part of the page mentions Meg Ryan repeatedly for some reason.
Evidently Hiroko imagined a Meg Ryan-like female professor when she got the first email …
I can send someone who reads Japanese a higher-resolution scan of the page if they’d be so kind as to translate it for me. Just send me your email and I’ll forward a scan.
Hiroko’s handwork is exquisite!
I hadn’t cottoned-on (sorry!) that the shirts are hand-embroidered until just now. Suddenly the nearly $300 bill seems a LOT more reasonable.
Could I justify it … well, if I had an fellow-traveller cat, maybe.
🙂 Good one.
I know what you mean. I’d also be afraid to wear the shirt because then I’d have to wash it.
That is a good point. I used to have a lovely tie which mimiced an amphibolitite under crossed Nicols – all brilliant second order colours with an overarching crystollagraphic orientation. Since I’d found such rocks in lenses in the high grade Archean parts of my thesis mapping area, I wore it to my graduation.
A couple of years later, I’d folded it up in the pocket of my shirt after a family night out … and it went into the hot wash with the shirt. Never found another like it.
Oh My God! Green tea Kit Kats…must have.
Hili looks happy in the photo.
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=green+tea+kit-kats
Only $6.37 on Amazon (much less than I imagined). Knock yourself out!
If you ever get the chance to try a green tea cake, don’t pass it up.
http://kitchentigress.blogspot.ca/2014/03/green-tea-matcha-cake.html
It would be loverly if somebody would alert Professor Ceiling Cat when she starts accepting orders so he can let the rest of us know….
And, Hiroko, if you’re reading this: your art is simply wonderful. Thanks for making the world that much more beautiful.
b&
I have been lucky enough to be put in queue for a shirt from Hiroko. The scheduled date is June . . . 2016. It’ll be worth the wait.
Hiroko’s work is exquisite…if I had a cat, getting one of her shirts would be a must. I wonder if she would ever think about doing a d*g. Did I just blaspheme?
sub
When there is ‘.edu’ at the end of email address, the sender tends to be those who are working in schools. Since I once received an email from a post graduate student, I asked ‘are you are a student?’, then I got a reply saying ‘I am professor’.
I generally envisage people ordered my shirts through actors/actress and celebrities. This time, ‘young Meg Ryan wearing a white gown’ appeared in my mind. I therefore exchanged emails with this vision in the beginning. However, when I asked about detailed information of height and size, I noticed that ‘Meg Ryan’ is a rather well-built person. Then I got an email with a link from wikipedia saying ‘I look like this’. I was surprised that it was a gentleman! ‘I thought you are female’ I wrote, and then he wrote in the reply ‘you learned something new –Jerry is normally male’. True, Tom and Jerry were also boys.
Jerry’s request was in detail. When I asked him to measure shirts he normally wears (indicating where you should measure), he wrote back to me saying, ‘do you think this seam should be included? The length of shirts tend to be different depending on shirts, which one would be the best?’. He even told me size both in centimetre and in inch. This extraordinary enthusiasm in ordering the shirt was all because of the debate ‘Dog vs Cat’. He needed to have an outfit for this debate (and he is of course one of the cat people).
‘I want to wear this under the jacket and want to show off my cat by taking off my jacket all of sudden!’, he wrote. ‘As I like blue, I want blue fabric. I like button-down style, so the collar should be like this. As for the cat, I think blue will match grey, so I will choose this cat’. He then sent me ten photos of the cat and all of them were large and high resolution photos (30000 pix)! When he received the shirt, he took a selfie and introduced the shirt in his blog which he uploads several times a day.
It is unfortunate that the cat people lost the debate, but the professor analysed, ‘as people in the debate did not change their opinion……. I guess there were more cat people in the venue’.
I hope this helps! From a Japanese PhD student in the UK 🙂
Very well done, Yuki. Thank you!