Paw & Palaces Just Got a Japanese Dub, and It's Six Cats Guarding the Forbidden City
Key takeaways
- Paw & Palaces is a Chinese donghua from 2025 getting a new Japanese dub, not a new anime
- Six cats guard the Forbidden City's relics by entering wuhua, inner worlds built from a relic's memories
- Tokyo MX aired episodes 1 through 4 back to back on October 10, with BS Nippon TV following a day later
- The production has an actual production credit from the Beijing Palace Museum Cultural Development company
If you saw Paw & Palaces pop up in a fall premiere list and assumed it was a new anime about cute cats, you got the cats part right and the rest slightly wrong. This is a donghua, the umbrella term for Chinese animation, originally produced by Colored Pencil Animation and released in China in late 2025. What landed this weekend is the Japanese-language dub, which started on Tokyo MX on October 10, 2026, and it is worth a look even if you do not normally follow Chinese animation.
What a donghua is doing on a Japanese broadcast schedule
Japanese networks picking up Chinese animated series for dubbed broadcast is not new, but it still catches people off guard when it shows up on a seasonal chart next to a dozen manga adaptations. Paw & Palaces comes from iQIYI, the Chinese streaming giant, adapted from a web manga, with Kuaikan Manhua also credited on the production side. The version premiering now is a localized Japanese dub of an existing show, so if you go looking for "episode 1" discussion online, you may find two years of Chinese-language fan reaction already sitting there waiting for you.
The actual premise, which is better than it sounds
Strip away the cute-animal marketing angle and the setup is genuinely clever. Six cats operate as a secret team protecting the Forbidden City's cultural treasures. The threats they face are not physical thieves. They defend something called wuhua, inner worlds built out of the memories carried inside cultural relics themselves. An antagonist named Black Owl is trying to rewrite or outright destroy those memories, which functions as a stand-in for cultural erasure dressed up as a fantasy-adventure plot.
That is a far more interesting premise than "cats save a museum," and it explains why a project like this got a production credit from Beijing Palace Museum Cultural Development, the company tied to the actual Palace Museum that occupies the real Forbidden City. This is not a generic licensed cash-in. Somebody involved wanted the show to carry real weight about the objects it is depicting.
Who is voicing it in Japanese
The dub cast leans on recognizable names. Kazuki Ura voices Soubi, Makoto Furukawa plays Oboi, Sora Amamiya voices Heian, Takeo Otsuka plays Zeze, Kentaro Tone voices Rohan, and Hikaru Tono rounds out the core six as Momo. The promotional material adds a deeper supporting cast, including Yoshitsugu Matsuoka as a character named Bantsu, M.A.O as Princess Maki, and Sho Hayami voicing Black Owl himself, which is a strong pull for a villain role. Riko Azuna performs both the opening and ending theme songs.
When and where to actually catch it
Tokyo MX kicked things off on Saturday, October 10 at 8:00 p.m. JST by airing episodes 1 through 4 in a single block rather than a normal one-episode premiere. BS Nippon TV picks up the same four-episode block a day later, airing in the very early hours of October 12. After that initial dump, the show settles into a more conventional weekly rhythm, with episode 5 moving to a regular Wednesday night slot on October 14 at 11:30 p.m. JST.
If you are hoping to catch the Japanese dub outside Japan, that part is still unsettled. No international streaming service has confirmed carrying this specific dubbed version yet, so your most reliable option right now may be tracking down the original Chinese-language release, which has been available since its 2025 run, while you wait to see whether a Japanese-audio stream gets picked up elsewhere.
Is it worth the time
If "cats defending cultural memory from an enemy trying to erase it" sounds like a strange pitch, that is honestly the appeal. Paw & Palaces is doing something a lot of seasonal anime charts are not even attempting this October: using a fantasy premise to actually say something about why preserving cultural artifacts matters, while still being, on the surface, a show about six cats running around the Forbidden City. The four-episode premiere dump gives you more than enough runway to find out in one sitting whether that balance actually works for you.
Would you watch six cats defend the Forbidden City, or does the premise sound like a stretch? Weigh in over in the chat.