that no other Japanese networks had covered them yet, so they sent a crew to film them for a popular Sunday-evening program called @Human , which introduces a wide TV audience at home to the sorts of interesting things happening at the moment on the internet. Manaho brings up a blog entry with a TV still of Musashi next to a cookie that has "NHK" printed on it. The economics of a viral Japanese cat can be nontrivial, as David Marx explains to me over a lunch debrief at Google's offices, on the 27th floor of a Roppongi high-rise. Marx is unusually tall for an American and thus almost impolitely tall in Japan. He's not only tall but he tapers, an effect accentuated by the wide float of his rolled trouser cuffs over narrow ankles. His black hair is prematurely frosted; it crowns a voluble fanboyish enthusiasm, giving his whole appearance the sense of an artful parody of distinction. He takes me back to his office, where there is a conference room with whiteboards for walls. He warns me that he's unable to comment on or speculate about individual YouTube partners, but we can talk generally about cats. He can't tell me exactly how many Japanese cat partners there are, but he nods when I ask if it's more than a hundred. "There are cats," he says, "that are making more money than the average salary in Japan" -- which the internet estimates to be around 18,250. Most of the