Your cat grooms itself for half the day.
Yet there are areas of its body it can't truly clean.
It's not laziness. It's anatomy.
Cats spend up to 50% of their active day grooming. It's an instinctive behavior, inherited from their wild ancestors: staying clean means not leaving scent traces for predators, regulating body temperature, and maintaining their fur in good condition.
There is a house in Kyoto where Haruka and her older brother grew up together.
A somewhat special house: work was discussed even at the dinner table, nine aunts and cousins would dine together, and dogs, cats, birds, lizards, goldfish, hamsters, crawfish, turtles, and frogs lived in the garden. It wasn't a zoo — it was simply their home.
The Sakamoto family has been practicing artisanal thread dyeing in Kyoto for generations, an art passed down from the great-grandfather to today. It's one of those families where work never truly ends when you return home: the craft was part of the daily fabric, of dinner conversations, of values naturally passed on to the children.
Haruka and her brother — two years her senior — grew up in this environment. A context where creating something with your own hands, doing it well, and passing it on had deep meaning.