This time, I wanted to make a slightly darker rap track.
I started thinking about a city setting, with an animal as the main character. That led to a black cat making his rounds through Tokyo: a little world-weary, familiar with the streets, and quite happy to keep his own hours while the humans rush around. He seemed like a good fit for the song.
For Tokyo Neko, I had both the music and the video in mind from the beginning.
A game I remembered seeing, but have never played
One source of inspiration was Stray, a game I had seen on Steam. It is an adventure game in which you play a cat exploring a cybercity.
I still have not played it. The idea of exploring a city as a cat simply stayed with me.
When I began thinking about an animal in an urban setting, that memory came back. I pictured a cat moving through Tokyo’s rooftops and alleys as if the whole place were his own yard. That remembered idea of a cat’s-eye view found its way into my own song and its Tokyo setting.
I wanted the black cat to be cool and streetwise. He wakes to the smell of fish and rests wherever he finds a sunny patch. No collar, no plans, but several good places to sleep. As I wrote the lyrics, I was also imagining how he lived.
“People rush. I just sleep.” That sums him up quite well. I wanted a little dry humor and ease inside the darker rap idea. Rooftops, market streets, and neon at night were already part of the picture as I worked on the music.
From Asakusa’s rooftops to Shibuya before the first train
The route takes in Asakusa, Ueno, Yanaka, Koenji, Nakano, Shinjuku, and Shibuya. Dawn on the roofs becomes daytime in the alleys, evening in the shopping streets, shelter from rain, neon at night, and the city before the first trains.
I used a character sheet to establish the cat and an art board to organize each neighborhood’s light and atmosphere. The scene board then grew into individual cuts. A fish shop, familiar storefronts, and other cats give him people and places to encounter along the way.
The first scene board had 16 scenes. I broke those into wider city views, expressions, paws, and small encounters, ending up with 77 cuts. The general editing guide was one to three seconds per cut.
I avoided reusing cuts, changed runs of similar compositions or movements, and adjusted the picture so each neighborhood arrived with its name in the lyrics. The cat stays with us while the city around him changes.
This was an unusually easy video to make
What stood out most was how little editing and backtracking this needed compared with the videos I had made recently. The video work felt very easy this time.
Walking over roofs, jumping across an alley, curling up to sleep: generating these movements went smoothly enough to make me wonder whether AI models have learned cat movement particularly well. That was the impression I came away with on this project.
There were still details to adjust. I looked again at pedestrians’ feet, rain beneath covered areas, and shots where the cat’s face came too close to the fish. Sometimes I chose a different part of a clip or replaced the shot; elsewhere I changed the framing or magnification.
I remember one alley-jump shot in particular. At one point, we used the section after the cat had landed. I felt the airborne moment worked better, so I brought it back. With “lane to lane” in the lyrics, I wanted to keep that small leap across the gap.
Those adjustments were part of a process that still felt pleasantly straightforward. Having a cat as the main character brought a kind of ease I had not expected.
Keeping his pace in Japanese and English
I kept the subtitles to a single line and removed their outlines. There are full-length square and widescreen versions, plus a vertical version of roughly 20 seconds from the first chorus. In the vertical edit, the complete square picture sits between black margins, with the lyrics in the lower margin.
The English version is titled Tokyo Neko. I used the existing English recording and the lyrics sung in that take, adjusting picture timing within the same overall duration. Both versions follow the cat through his day in Tokyo.
Audio and lyrics: Japanese recording · English recording.
A cat game I remembered seeing on Steam met the urge to make a darker rap track, and became a black cat wandering through Tokyo.
People rush. I just sleep.
He is a little world-weary, but he knows where he belongs. I hope you will follow him over the roofs and into the next alley.
Industrial / Japanese experimental rap東京ネコOpen the song page for audio, lyrics, and notes.Explore this song →Thank you for reading.
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