In one chilly early evening in May, I was waiting for a train in the station passageway taking shelter from the wind.

     Suddenly I heard a loud noise like "BANG!" immediately by me. I felt danger and my body had shrunk.

     A board fell down from the ceiling to the floor just in front of my scope, and I saw a white cat falling together with the board and starting to run.

     The cat was running around at his highest speed in the station passageway seeking the exit, whose face was full of fear. After three seconds from falling, the cat had already passed through an automatic ticket gate, and had jumped out to the square without showing "his commuter pass".

     All passengers were being surprised for a while, and were gazing at the new hole of the ceiling and the direction where the cat had gone.

     When I looked at the fallen board again, I found that it was about 40cm(= 1.3 feet) square and it looked heavy. Large injury should have been happened, if it hit people.
     But, fortunately, there were nobody within less than 1 meter. I was also safe.

     I guess that the cat had entered from some hole to the underpart of the roof by mistake.

     He could not find any hole to escape in darkness and became panic, so he might have be running about wildly for a long time and might kicked down the ceiling board, which cannot be separated by ordinary pressure.

     The panic cat was pitiful, but he seemed uninjured, for he had fallen with the board beneath him. He was also saved from death by starvation.

     However, I thought that we could feel easy if the station staffs check the safety of the ceiling boards, and if they close the hole when there is no cat, so that no danger for people or cats is left any more.

     This picture is the photograph of the what I taken the spot after several minutes from the "accident", because then at last I remembered that I had a digital camera.

     The "white cat" and the "board" in the picture was missing in fact at the shutter moment. They are drawn again according to my memory using a computer .

     By the way, this picture was appeared in the local page of a newspaper.

     The newspaper also wrote that the stationmaster expressed apology and promise to take a recurrence preventive measure soon, so I thought it vary gracious.

     In addition, I heard newspapers can report only "true view", so I presented the original picture with neither the cat nor the board instead of this picture with the cat and the board.

     After that, the ceiling was reinforced, and the fallen board was remade as an access bole.



     It sounds some good signs that a white cat appeared in the unexpected fashion in front of me, or the researcher on CATS (Common Automatic Transport System).