Kitten Hell

'Chibi,' our kitten for one day before releasing him back into "the wild" 

Today was one of the strangest adventures I have had in Japan. It was a stressful day, but one Becky and I will remember forever. Several days earlier we heard the sound of a phantom kitten. The little meows were so loud that we thought that they came from inside our house. We jumped off the couch and ran to the stairs. The meows were louder, and we ran up the stairs to search for the sounds. We found nothing. And we decided there was no way a cat could get in the house from our second floor.

The next day, we decided that there must have been cats under the house. A few days later, we heard the meows again. This time, they were louder and they wouldn’t stop. Upon careful examination, we decided that were must be kittens in the crawl space under the stairs. I got on some scrubby clothes, got a flashlight, and ran outside. To our dismay, we discovered that the only access to the crawl was six-inch pipe that was missing its cover.   Back in the house, we opened the closet under the stairs. The walls of this closet were 1/8-inch wood, held in by tiny nails. This is part of the reason why Japanese houses get so cold in the winter! I got some tools and started carefully prying some nails out of the wall. We finally were able to get enough out to partially pull open the wall. I got my flashlight and Becky got a compact, and we peered into the hole swat-team style via the mirror and light. Becky saw two kittens crouching in the corner! One was moving around and one was crouching with little movement.

We quickly went to our hardware store and bought a few tools and a bunch of kitten supplies. We went home and finished preparing for the kitten extraction. I got the door opened far enough for Becky to get her head in but not an arm. Both kittens seemed very interested in the flashlight, and the stronger of the two walked over to it. Unable to extract the kittens, I preceded to remove the entire panel. With the panel finally off, I pulled out a cute little runt of a cat, and got him in a warm kitty box. The other kitten was nowhere to be seen. I stuck my head in the whole and saw there were three pipes leading out of the under-stairs space.

We determined the kittens to be about one-month old. Becky did lots of kitten research and got him to drink some kitten milk and go pee. Our kitten was a boy and definitely the runt of the two. After a while, the other kitten started meowing loudly from a pipe under our kitchen, but there was nothing we could do. We were both very worried about the second kitten and didn’t like the idea of separating them.   We starting calling the kitten Chibi, or runt in Japanese. Chibi slept for a while after he fed. Becky and I were very uneasy about losing Chibi’s brother, but we couldn’t do anything to get him to come to us. Finally, I heard a meow, but it wasn’t the brother’s. This was a low meow, an angry meow.

I went outside and discovered Akamimi! Akamimi, meaning “red ears” in Japanese, is what we named the stray cat that we sometimes fed. We suddenly realized that not only was Akamimi not a male cat, but she was a mama cat, and she was pissed! She low-meowed at me, and hissed at me. Chibi was meowing loudly from inside the house. Akamimi could hear him, and she wanted him back! We were stunned. Akamimi is not a very big cat. We would have never guessed she had been pregnant. I had given her a bread roll a week earlier, and she looked the same as she did when we first met her, presumably before giving birth to the two kittens.

From this point, we didn’t know what to do. We were so excited about rescuing kittens, we never really stopped to consider that they didn’t need rescuing! I went out the front door to look for Akamimi. I walked down to the open pipe, which I had blocked with a cement block to keep the kittens in. The block was knocked over! Akamimi must have done it with her mother-rage. I ran back in the house and quickly blocked the crawl space and closed the closet door. We didn’t need Akamimi’s mother-rage to come bounding into our living room.

We discussed it for a while and decided that we would put Chibi into the crawl space before bed. If Akamimi came for him that night so be it. If she didn’t, then we would take care of him. Becky went down stairs in the morning only to be greeted by the sound of a very hungry Chibi. We pulled him out of the crawl space, and I got him to eat some breakfast. He was very antsy, meowing non-stop and trying to crawl all over the place.  I think I experienced the stress of a parent for the first time in my life, not knowing how to get him to quiet down. I tried to go about my day, while returning to milk him and cuddle him as best I could.

Becky emailed me to say that she read kittens should stay with their mother to at least six weeks. We decided we would try to reunite Akamimi and Chibi next time we saw her, and hopefully she would have him. Late in the morning, I heard a low meow. I opened the crawl space. Nothing. I went back to being stressed out for a while. I heard another low meow. Chibi almost jumped out of my hands. I opened the closet door, and put Chibi on the ground. He RAN toward the crawl space. I cracked open the wall and saw a pacing Akamimi inside. Chibi ran up to the end of the floor. Akamimi frantically tried to grab him by the nape of his neck. She finally just toppled him off the edge. She grabbed him and went for the pipes. I closed the wall and breathed a huge sigh of relief.

It has been a couple of days, and we haven’t heard any cat sounds. Hopefully Akamimi relocated to one of the under-stairs areas in one of the vacant apartments instead of ours. We’re also hoping that she doesn’t hold any grudges when the kittens are big enough to leave the kitten nest. It would be fun to see Chibi again when he is a little older and big enough to eat our table scraps.

It goes with out saying that our kitten adventure had not gone as planned, but it reminded us of how much we loved having a cat in our home.  We miss Moses now more than ever...