Maneki-neko Day falls on September 29 for no reason deeper than the pun. But the cat behind the pun has a real story, and it starts at a run-down temple outside Tokyo sometime in the Edo period, roughly the 1600s. A poor priest lived there with his only companion, a cat named Tama, sharing whatever scraps he had.

Then a storm hit, and a stranger showed up.

A feudal lord named Ii Naotaka was riding home from a hunting trip when the weather turned. He took shelter under a tree near the temple gate. According to the legend, Tama sat at the entrance and raised a paw at him — beckoning him inside, away from the tree, moments before lightning split it. The lord followed the cat in, waited out the storm with the priest, and was so grateful he became the temple’s patron. Gōtokuji Temple prospered for generations afterward. When Tama eventually died, the priest built a statue in her memory: sitting, one paw raised, exactly as she’d been that night.

That statue is still standing. Gōtokuji Temple in Tokyo’s Setagaya ward now displays hundreds of maneki-neko of every size, left there by visitors hoping some of Tama’s luck rubs off. Nobody counts them anymore. They just keep arriving.

The design has rules most people follow without knowing why. A raised right paw is supposed to invite money. A raised left paw invites people — customers, guests, company. Color matters too: white for general good fortune, gold for wealth specifically, black to ward off evil. None of it is regulated by anything. It’s just what stuck, repeated by enough shopkeepers for enough centuries that it calcified into tradition.

What actually happened at that temple gate 400 years ago is unrecoverable — no one wrote it down until the Meiji era, long after the fact, and other cities tell competing versions with different cats and different names. What’s verifiable is simpler: somewhere, a cat did something a person found meaningful enough to sculpt in clay, and the sculpture outlived every argument about whether the story was true.