A Cat With Your Cup Of Tea
Is there anything you cannot get or do in Japan? This actually isn’t completely nuts, or gross or downright weird for a change: Feline cafés. Just a little bit odd… but hey, that’s Japan!
Tokyo has at least three “cat cafés” that have opened this year where people can mingle with cats as they enjoy a cup of tea.
Takafumi Fukui, the 34-year-old owner and a long-time cat lover, quit his job at a television game company and started the cafe in March.
“In Tokyo, it’s not that easy to have cats,” he said, explaining that tight housing regulations often forbid pets.
A purrfect solution for the fluffy fur ball lover to get a nice cup of coffee and stroke away.
Visitors to Calico pay 800 yen ($7) an hour or 2,000 yen for three hours in a big room where 14 well-brushed and shampooed cats hang out.
None of Calico’s cats are strays, but the cafe puts up posters for abandoned cats seeking homes. Pet dumping is a problem in Japan, where about 240,000 cats and 160,000 dogs without owners are gassed each year, government data showed.
A Calico regular, Kazunori Hamanaka,can’t keep pets at home and says:
“Stray cats run away when I try to stroke them. Here, it’s great that I can do that,”
He also takes about 200 pictures each time he does to visit the pussycats.