LOCATION: Inside a cat cafe

New types of cafes aim to fill not only their patrons’ need for food and drink, but also their needs for warmth, understanding or affection in one of the world’s most stressed out cities.

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Let me get this out there right now…. I love cats…. No… I LOVE cats!!!

So after living a few (too many) cat free months in Tokyo, I was rather (very extremely profoundly) excited to be visiting my first cat cafe. Though faunning over the cats was admittedly my main goal, the most interesting thing was not the cats, but the other patrons.

In a recent Gallup World View study, only 58% of Japanese citizens were able to answer that they had felt love the previous day (in comparison, 73% of Swedes and a whooping 92% of Rwandans and Filipinos had felt more love than their Japanese counterparts).

This is not to say that Japanese families are not loving (in my experience, they are some of the most tight-knit, loving families around), but there is a strong divide in Japanese culture between the safe warm private domain and the more formal, less forgiving public domain where people must hide behind their tatemae, or outside face, at all times. Recently, however, a number of semi-private institutions have appeared, seemingly to bridge this gap between the private and the public. Cat cafes, dog cafes, maid cafes, cafes where men can have their ears cleaned by kimono clad women, cafes where loveless geeks can be cuddled and even recently, I’ve heard, a cafe in Shijuku where girls can air out the ultra-taboo topic of female masturbation!

So far I’ve only ever been to a cat cafe though.

Ostensibly though, the reason Japanese people so want to hang out with cats is because most apartments are small and owning a pet at home is a rare commodity. And I deliberative use the word “commodity”.

A good friend who knows a lot about the pet culture in Japan says that it is absolutely horrible. Everyone wants to own the latest popular breed animal (in the same way they want to own the latest designer bag), so breading farms which are subject to hardly any animal protection laws churn out unhealthy numbers of overbred and sickly puppies and kittens. People rarely adopt rescue animals which are therefore put down straight away and pet stores also have pretty harsh “sell or kill” standards. 

All the cats in that cafe were breeds and some did look a tad overbred (Munchkins with legs so short they could hardly walk, Persians with faces so squished they had trouble drinking). It also felt a bit odd to be wandering through this room of cats as if I was wandering through a product showroom.

That said, whether visiting a cat cafe is just another form of consumerism  or whether it really is a way to relax and remember the better things in life, all things considered the cats did seem happy, well taken care of and well fed. I even heard one girl saying to another patron she did not know (something which rarely happens in Japan): “It really makes you relax doesn’t it? Being around so many relaxed cats, I feel relaxed myself.”

Have a squee over these pictures!