Imagine you’re in Tokyo, where it’s overcrowded and overpriced and the stress is overwhelming and they won’t even let you keep a small pet in your minuscule apartment for crying out loud.
And dammit, you need some fur. It’s the end of a long hard day and the craving for purring sets in, and you’ve got to have your fix. Internet pics won’t cut it; it has to be real.
So you head to your favorite cafe. You pay 1000 yen (about $12 US), get your half-decaf soy latte, and even though they put too much foam on it again and you think the world can’t get any worse and you’re about to go ballistic, a cat jumps on your lap and you stroke it, and suddenly everything’s OK again.
You’re at one of Tokyo’s Cat Cafes, where many residents go when they can no longer deal with humans. The $12 fee lets you cuddle, stroke and play with cats for an hour. With well over a hundred of them scattered around Japan, and more than 70 in Tokyo proper, Cat Cafes are a trend that started about 5 years ago and quickly caught on thanks to strict housing regulations that don’t permit animals in apartments.
But new Animal Protection Laws are threatening their existence. Aimed primarily at stopping the city’s inhumane pet shops that operate 24 hours a day, the laws that go into effect on June 1st will put a curfew on Cat Cafes, and force them to remove all cats from the petting public at 8pm, just when many Tokyoites are heading home from work and stopping by to get their fix.
Hiromi Kawase, owner of one of the Cat Cafes says “Everybody knows cats are really happy in the evening, with their big, cute eyes. So I just can’t understand why the people at the top are ignoring this. It’s really strange.”
Yes, the new laws are going to be catastrophic.
All responses to this post should be in the form of a cat pic. There are certainly enough of them out there.