I found out about cats living in Japanese temples from a book called Zen Cats by Yoshiyuki Yaginuma. The author writes about visiting shrines all over Japan, and finding cats living there. Since we made a trip to Tokyo, I had to look for some myself. These kitties are from the Senso-ji Temple in the Asakusa neighborhood of Tokyo. They have admirers who come to bring them food. (We think the people feeding them were curious to see us paying so much attention to the kitties and taking their pictures. They were feeding the kitties dried fish chips). The brown kitty was friendlier, and actually got close enough to sniff me. The white one wouldn't get very close. She is a Japanese Bobtail as you can see from the third picture below, and she has two different color eyes.