Japanese Animal Cafes and the Iyashi Boom

Socializing with Animals

Animal café are, of course, also distinctive from other kinds of intimacy businesses because customers are coming not to spend time with service workers, but to be with animals. As mentioned, the most common café animals are ones like cats or rabbits that customers can pet or cuddle; visitors are not just interested in talking with their animal companion but in the positive affective feeling, what the Japanese refer to as iyashi, that comes from touch and connecting physically with another being. Visitors also talk about the sense that they communicate with the animals and can share their feelings with them; this communication may be nonverbal on the side of the animals, but it is valuable enough that they are happy to pay for the opportunity to experience it.

 Research has shown that interactions with animals lead to demonstrable stress reduction, but the popularity of animal cafés in Japan is driven by a variety of factors beyond just the physical benefits that come from getting to touch an animal. A major element is the fact that interaction and communication with an animal can offer a sense of sociality without the anxiety that interaction with humans can carry, creating an encounter that offers connection without tension. Visitors can focus only on what they want out of the social encounter and do not have to think about the needs and concerns of the other, as they would another Japanese person [Figure 9]. Additionally, animal café customers largely were young children during Japan’s pet boom, in the 1970s and 1980s, and so strongly associate animals like cats with their childhood homes and the pets they grew up with.

Different kinds of animal cafés, and the opportunity to interact with different species, each offer a particular type of experience. Cat cafés tend to focus more on quiet relaxation and comfort, with an emphasis on relaxing with domesticated animals. Many people living in Tokyo and other big cities live in very small studio apartments that do not allow pets, so spending time with a cat in a cat café gives them the opportunity to be with a pet they do not have space for at home and to connect nostalgically to the sense of social connection of their formative years. Customers activities in cat cafés, playing with cat toys, curling up next to the cats, or taking pictures of them dressed in funny hats, are close to how they might spend time with their own pet.

In contrast, other types of animal cafés create value by giving visitors the opportunity to see and touch “wild” animals who they would not otherwise encounter. Time spent in these businesses is more focused on appreciating the novel opportunity to gently touch or take pictures with a more unusual creature. Interacting with rabbits in a rabbit café gives customers the feeling that they are nurturing and caring for an animal they see as docile and innocent, along with the thrill of being with an animal they would not usually have the chance to touch. This is even more true for owl and other bird cafés, where customers can be close to non-domesticated species, and get a chance to feel like they are connecting to the “natural” world, a space that feels far away from their heavily urbanized daily life. By connecting with animals, customers can vicariously enjoy the freedom from societal constraints that non-humans represent.

The website of one Tokyo cat café refers to the cats as “staff,” and while this is clearly meant as a joke, the animals in cafés do create value through their “labor” in the café. Animals are trained from birth for life in a café, learning to be non-aggressive, comfortable with many people and other animals, and patient with human attention. Life for a café animal can be stressful if there is too much stimulation, as animals may be woken, petted, picked up or otherwise interfered with throughout the day. Cafés accommodate the animals’ needs by providing spaces to which an animal can retreat or be moved to for a rest when they are being over-socialized, and cats and rabbits will then return from their rests energized to play with visitors once again.  Additionally, human employees are quick to head off any problems, such as mishandling of an animal by a guest or any issues between animals. The animals are well trained enough that there are rarely problems. Some cafés sell snacks for cats or rabbits to facilitate interaction between animals and humans, and the human employees act as a bridge between the two, demonstrating what one animal likes or another’s favorite toy.

This does not mean that customers demand that café animals always be friendly and willing to play or be touch. In fact, customers appreciate the fact that animals will express their feelings (even dislike of a person) freely; this freedom to act on one’s impulses is part of the attraction of animals to café customers. Many customers happily spent much of their time in a café “being with” the animal, taking pictures or relaxing near animals, without needing to touch an animal that does not enjoy it. This also means that when customers have become regular enough visitors that they are recognized and greeted by a café cat, they know they have truly earned the friendship of the animal. When a cat deigns to curl up next to a regular customer it has become familiar with, the honesty of that expression of affection is more meaningful.