Tsutsuji (Doge's Cat Sister)

Origin

Atsuko Sato started the blog Taking a walk with Kabosu-chan in June 2009, and her stated reason was not fame. She had adopted Kabosu in 2008 after a puppy mill closure, and she used the blog to argue against buying dogs from mills and in favour of adopting animals that already needed homes. It was a household diary, and the household included cats. On 23 February 2010 she posted the photograph of Kabosu sitting on a sofa with her front paws crossed and her eyebrows raised, which was later overlaid with Comic Sans and became Doge. Tsutsuji is in the same archive. Japanese pet press covered the arrangement directly: Inu no Kimochi Web Magazine ran a feature on the daily life of three siblings with tails, naming Kabosu the shiba inu, Tsutsuji the queen cat and Ginnan the cuddly cat, and a third cat, Onigiri, joined later. Her exact arrival in the household is not something MemePedia can pin down from primary sources. Tribute sites describe her as fourteen years old around 2024, which would place her birth near 2010, and they claim she was found abandoned with her umbilical cord still attached and was the only kitten of her litter to survive. That rescue account traces back to token marketing rather than to Sato, so we record it as a claim rather than a fact.

Spread

For roughly a decade Tsutsuji was famous only in the way that a celebrity's flatmate is famous. That changed after Kabosu was diagnosed with leukaemia and liver disease and died on 24 May 2024 at the age of eighteen, at which point the Doge community went looking for anything still attached to the story. Sato's other animals were promptly financialised. Tsutsuji's specific hook was the CATE line from Sato's book, Walking together with you forever, Kabosu-chan, in which her husband compares the cat's poses to the dog's and concludes that if the dog is DOGE, the cat is CATE. That single sentence became the entire marketing pitch for a series of tokens, most of which reproduce it word for word on their landing pages. The pattern that followed is familiar to anyone who has watched a derivative meme get mined: an initial contract, a developer who walked away from it, a community takeover that revived the ticker, then a fresh contract launched by someone else claiming to be the real one, then a third, then a cross chain wave. Crypto media has covered the whole cluster as one narrative rather than one asset, which is generous, because the contracts have competing owners, competing websites and no shared treasury.

Legacy

Tsutsuji is a useful test case for what MemePedia means by a disputed origin. She is a real cat with a verifiable place in the most documented meme in crypto history, and she also has at least nine contracts claiming her, none of which can prove primacy. The earliest we can verify is an Ethereum token using the ticker TSUTSUJI whose Uniswap pair was created on 18 December 2023, five months before Kabosu died, now run as a community takeover under the name OG Tsutsuji. The most widely listed is a second Ethereum token, TSUJI, styled Tsutsuji, Doge's sister, whose pair was created on 30 July 2024 and which carries the CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap listings and its own separate community takeover. Two more Ethereum contracts followed within five weeks in August 2024, a token called Tsutsuji the Cate arrived in May 2025, and Solana mints appeared in December 2025, January 2026 and again in July 2026, the most recent of which pulled over two million dollars of volume on its first day while every older contract sat under 40,000 dollars of market cap. MemePedia lists the two Ethereum contracts with real trading history and marks neither as OG, because the honest position is that we cannot prove which of them was first to the idea, only which was first to a liquidity pool we can still read. Atsuko Sato has never endorsed any of them, and none of the tokens disclose any arrangement with her or with the cat.

The Chain Trail

MemePedia tracks 2 Tsutsuji (Doge's Cat Sister) memecoins across Ethereum.

Key facts

• Tsutsuji is one of the cats in the household of Atsuko Sato, the Japanese kindergarten teacher who adopted the shiba inu Kabosu, the dog behind Doge, in 2008.
• Sato launched her blog Taking a walk with Kabosu-chan in June 2009 to campaign against puppy mills and in favour of adopting shelter animals.
• The photograph that became Doge was posted to that blog on 23 February 2010; Tsutsuji appears throughout the same archive.
• Inu no Kimochi Web Magazine covered the household as three siblings with tails: Kabosu the shiba inu, Tsutsuji the queen cat and Ginnan the cuddly cat, with a third cat, Onigiri, joining later.
• In Sato's book Walking together with you forever, Kabosu-chan, her husband is quoted saying that if Kabo-chan is DOGE then Tsutsuji-chan is CATE, because the cat copied the dog's poses.
• Tribute sites describe Tsutsuji as fourteen years old around 2024 and claim she was rescued abandoned with her umbilical cord attached as the sole survivor of her litter; that account comes from token marketing, not from Sato.
• Kabosu died on 24 May 2024 aged eighteen, after which tokens attached to Sato's remaining animals multiplied.
• The earliest Tsutsuji contract MemePedia can verify is an Ethereum token whose Uniswap pair was created on 18 December 2023, now run as a community takeover called OG Tsutsuji.
• A second Ethereum contract, TSUJI, styled Tsutsuji, Doge's sister, opened its pair on 30 July 2024 and holds the CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap listings, also under a separate community takeover.
• At least nine Tsutsuji contracts exist across Ethereum, Solana and Robinhood Chain between December 2023 and July 2026, with no proof of which came first, so MemePedia treats the on chain origin as disputed and assigns no OG.
• Atsuko Sato has never endorsed any Tsutsuji token and none disclose any arrangement with her.