Kishi Station sits on the Kishigawa Line, a little local railway run by Wakayama Electric Railway. Tama was born in 1999 and grew up around the station, where a woman named Toshiko Koyama ran a shop and looked after the neighborhood cats. Koyama had been the station’s informal manager for years, and she had adopted Tama around 2004.

Then, in 2006, the railway cut its station staff. Nobody was left to run Kishi Station, and the cats living around it were in danger of being sent away.

Koyama went to the railway’s president, Mitsunobu Kojima, and asked him to let them stay. The story goes that she was still calling after him as he left, asking what would happen to Tama.

He came up with a plan. On January 5, 2007, Tama became the station master.

She was an official employee, not a mascot. She got a gold name tag and a tiny custom hat, which took the railway more than six months to get right. Her pay was a year’s worth of cat food.

It worked. Passengers on the line were up 17 percent in January 2007 compared with the year before. One study put the first-year economic effect at around 1.1 billion yen, though that figure is only “said to be” accurate. Visitors came from all over Japan just to meet her. The line added Tama merchandise, a Tama-themed train, and even a station building shaped like a cat’s face.

And Tama kept getting promoted. She became “super station master” in 2008 and was made a knight of Wakayama later that year. In 2010 she became an operating officer, the first cat executive of a railroad corporation. By 2013 she was honorary president for life.

She died on June 22, 2015, at age 16, of heart failure. More than 3,000 people came to her company funeral. She was later enshrined as Tama Daimyōjin, and her successor Nitama carried on the job.

Buster’s take: A cat got promoted five times and never once attended a meeting. Frankly, that is the dream. Lucky’s take: Her whole job was sitting there looking lovely, and it saved a railway! Best employee ever!