The Filipino-sniffing cat

I came home from class today, unlocked the front door and out popped Mister Tanaka. This is noteworthy for two reasons: At home (that is to say, in the States), he hasn't expressed any interest in going outside ever since he moved to a house with screened porches, and ever since arriving in the Philippines, he's turned tail and run into the house any time a door has been opened in his presence.

I scooped him up off the front porch and took him to the back yard, which Shelly has very cleverly cat-proofed with chicken wire. He spent a few minutes sniffing around the patio, then the garden until he saw the gardener, when he sprinted back into the house.

At which point I realized that Mister Tanaka hasn't yet met a Filipino he likes.

Tanaka has always been a friendly cat, playing with literally anyone who would give him the time of day, from Mom and Jerry to Nick and Kathy to Brad and Laura to Vivian to Kathy and Ed -- or at least Kathy, as Ed really wanted little to do with Tanaka. We had Jim over dinner last week, and Tanaka took to him like it was the most natural thing in the world, rubbing against Jim's leg and begging for a bite of dinner, but when Bobby came to the door with a vacuum cleaner Shelly had ordered at work, Tanaka headed upstairs.

It seemed as though Tanaka's aversion to Filipinos was based on skin color.

The theory seemed sound until I realized that the vet who saw him in September was black. Tanaka seemed quite happy with her, aside from the poking and prodding she doing to him, which left the skin color theory dead in the water.

Then I remembered that my friends and I used to joke about gaijin-sniffing dogs when I lived in Japan. Dogs, it seemed, would never bark at the mailman, the newspaper man, any sort of delivery man -- or even ax murderers for that matter, provided they were Japanese. As soon as a foreigner wandered down the street, however, the dogs were off and barking, even before they could see us. The theory, then, was that because most of my friends and I tended to eat a fairly Western diet, we smelled different to the dogs than Japanese did which, in turn, caused them to bark at us.

While the typical Japanese diet and the typical Western diet are significantly different, it doesn't seem that the Filipino diet is that much different than what we're used to. Certainly, there are differences, but nothing as pronounced as those between Western and Japanese. The truth is, I have no idea why Tanaka doesn't seem to like any of the Filipinos he has met. I hope he'll get over this soon, though, since he is, well, in the Philippines.

Parting thought: If Tanaka's aversion to Filipinos is diet- and scent-based, I guess you could say that we have a Filipino-sniffing cat.