Cat cafe, Tokyo 2010. Hiroshi Otabe/AP/Press Association Images. All rights reserved.Cats are the stars of our social media lives. Cat videos and cat memes are now common, if not clichéd, tools through which boredom and stress are managed and alleviated. They are celebrated by us in anthropomorphic terms as being alternately unruly, inscrutable, cute, and charming. These are the emotions that fuel an industry extending from Instagram and Facebook into the physical world.
You can see this most vividly in the explosion of ‘cat cafes’ throughout East Asia (most prominently in Japan) and now, worldwide. The first cat café opened in Taiwan in 1998, and they soon spread to Japan where the first café opened in Osaka in 2004, and one year later in Tokyo. Current numbers are a bit difficult to ascertain, but it is estimated that there are over roughly 40 of these cafes in the Tokyo metropolitan area.
Japan’s cat cafes are public spaces where customers pay by the hour to drink coffee (or sometimes alcohol), relax, read manga, and play with cats, or attempt to at least. These cafes are homely spaces, meant to evoke the experience of being in your apartment through the carefully staged use of furniture, lighting, reading materials, and background music. Not surprisingly, they are mostly concentrated in Japan’s urban centres, where a high percentage of people live alone. And they are only one choice among a range of themed outlets including maid cafes, music cafes, rabbit cafes and owl cafes.
