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Apart from the horned owls on the Kantei
roof, other stone animals also adorned the Kantei. Leaving the Large Dining
Room on the first floor, you would find three frogs hopping around against a backdrop
of blue tiles. When the Kantei was built, although it no longer did so,
one of these frogs would spurt water from its mouth. No detailed records exist
to tell us why there were frogs in the Kantei. However, frogs have always
been part of people's everyday lives since ancient times, and in some regions
they are seen as guardian deities of the paddy fields and the rain.
Two stones each were also positioned on the right and left of the steps of the
Kantei's porte-cochere, all four engraved with the face of a cat. Their
silhouettes had been weathered away in some places so some people did not even
realize that they were actually cats. "Why on earth are cats here?"
was not an uncommon question. In ancient Egypt, cats were sanctified, and the
ancient Egyptians used to believe the reason cats' eyes shone in the night was
because sunlight passed down through them to watch over the underworld. So, it
does not take much to imagine the cats as guardians of the Kantei! |
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