Pretend it's a mysterious foreign creature with a social aura of mystique about it in your culture. It's 3am and you are stumbling home, having had too much sake, and you see this enormous shadow on the wall all out of proportion to anything you would expect to see from something the size of a house cat.

You can't readily identify it from the intimidating shadow that seems like a fierce creature that could maul you to death and it seems to be drinking from a bowl of fire...

(Waits for all the Japanese historians to leap at the chance to correct my inaccurate vision of this scene.)