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About thirteen years ago, a kitten wandered onto the grounds of the Okayama Prefectural Police Academy in western Japan and simply stayed. The staff named her Tama and gave her the rank every new recruit starts with — junsa, patrol officer. She has since been promoted to keishi: Superintendent.
The Japanese police ladder runs patrol officer, sergeant, assistant inspector, inspector, superintendent. Human officers move up it through written exams and performance reviews, and plenty of them retire without ever reaching the rank Tama now holds. Her record, as several people in the thread pointed out, is not thin either: morning roll call with the cadets, patrols of the campus, greeting staff at the door, sitting in on training and school ceremonies, and the duty nobody can argue with — keeping a building full of stressed trainees calm.
Honorary animal appointments have a small but sturdy tradition in Japan; the most famous is a calico stationmaster at a rural railway station in Wakayama who kept getting promoted until her title outranked most of the humans on the line. What makes this one land differently is the setting. A police academy is where the rules about who gets promoted and why are taught, and the cat has been quietly working the system from inside it for over a decade.
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My take
Comments loosely translated for tone. Reactions collected from Togetter and X threads.
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[Fast-track promotion] Kitten that wandered into a police academy makes Superintendent a few years later
She turned up at the Okayama Prefectural Police Academy about 13 years ago and was named “Officer Tama” — and has now risen to Superintendent. Her “work ethic” is said to be genuinely solid: she joins the cadets’ morning roll call, their exercise and training, and school events. (Okayama is a prefecture in western Japan, a few hours from Osaka.)
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> “The instructors initially warned everyone not to feed her, but she was so friendly that they eventually started spoiling her.”
Love this part. Classic cat.
The original ends with さす猫 (sasu-neko), a squashing-together of さすが (sasuga, “as expected — of course they did”) and 猫 (neko, cat). It’s a one-word shrug meaning roughly “well, it’s a cat, what did you think was going to happen.”
“…a dedicated bed known as ‘Tama House’ has been set up in a corner of the entrance lobby…”
Okay, that got a laugh out of me, I’ll admit it w
“Officer Tama → Superintendent Tama” is a serious climb.
Real officers go patrol officer → sergeant → assistant inspector → inspector → superintendent, so on titles alone that’s four steps up. And normally promotion is decided by exams and performance reviews.
If you lay out Tama’s roughly 13 years the way a performance review would:
…that job description is way too broad.
I came in thinking “cat promoted for being friendly,” and left thinking the record actually holds up as a personnel evaluation.
[Follow-up]
Some of you pointed out that I skipped senior patrol officer — but senior patrol officer isn’t an independent rank.
The ranks laid out in Article 62 of the Police Act are: Superintendent General → Senior Commissioner → Chief Superintendent → Senior Superintendent → Superintendent → Inspector → Assistant Inspector → Sergeant → Patrol Officer.
And the regulations on senior patrol officers themselves say that a senior patrol officer “serves as a patrol officer.”
So in my original post I pulled out the ranks only, and wrote patrol officer → sergeant → assistant inspector → inspector → superintendent.
Superintendent Tama’s HR analysis is going deeper than anyone expected w
[Police Act, Article 62, excerpt] “The ranks of police officers (excluding the Commissioner General) shall be Superintendent General, Senior Commissioner, Chief Superintendent, Senior Superintendent, Superintendent, Inspector, Assistant Inspector, Sergeant and Patrol Officer.”
[Regulations on Senior Patrol Officers, Article 3, excerpt] “In addition to serving as a patrol officer, a senior patrol officer shall perform the duties listed in the following items.”
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