29 August 2009
Cat cafes aren't a particularly new phenomenon in Japan anymore, but they're far less well-known than the almost ubiquitous maid cafes and cosplay cafes. Aside from seeing giant robots, my latest sojourn to Tokyo included a directive to enter every weird cafe I found. Hence, Cat Cafe Nekorobi:
It's a den of adorable.
Cat cafes work a bit like manga cafes - you pay a cover charge for however long you stay, you get unlimited drinks from the machine, and can then play with the cats, pet them, or just watch - whatever you want. The cats themselves are the most pampered creatures in existence, and do pretty much whatever they want, and this includes ignoring you.
We arrived at feeding time.
There are a bunch of rules, of course. You have to wash your hands first - not for your hygiene, mind, but for the cats'. You're not allowed food, because there's risk of overfeeding. You can take photos, but not with flash. Obviously, tail-pulling is not allowed, and neither are children under a certain age. This is the store in which the customer is never right.
It's some kind of lion cat!
It's a pretty clever idea for people who live in the city - renters who can't own cats but would like to, specifically. And it's also a really relaxing retreat from the endless hustle and bustle of the city. And there are seats. You have no idea how hard it is to find somewhere to sit in Tokyo. No wonder everyone is so fit. There's so much standing and walking.
Not content with merely one cat cafe experiece, I tried another one in the same area!
All cat cafes are hidden several stories up, like all other places of interest in Tokyo. Ground floor is for chumps!
This one was a little more expensive than Nekorobi (which charged roughly $10 an hour), but it was much larger and had more cats. You had to pay for drinks individually at this one, but they also provided several bookcases of manga and magazines to read, as well as free internet, and even a TV and DVD player! There were plenty of photo albums of cute cat pictures strewn about in both places, too. You can't really go wrong with cute cat pictures ever.
You could kill a whole day in this place, easily, even without the distraction of adorable cats.
There are cages were they keep the cats during 'time-out' (some of the cats would get a little rowdy when play-fighting, and also this is where they go when the place gets cleaned). But most of the cats used it as a place to retreat when they decided they really didn't care to lavished with attention after all. I can only imagine what a dog cafe would be like. Dogs actually LIKE being endlessly fawned over by strangers.
It reminds me of those old 'find all the butterflies' pictures they stuck to newsletters in primary school.
Needless to say, somebody need to start one of these up outside of Japan! Although it's hard to imagine it working anywhere else.
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