Places, Images, Times & Transformations

Japanese Animal Cafes and the Iyashi Boom

Pages

  • <
  • Page
  • 3
  • of 6
  • >

Animal Cafés and the Iyashi Boom

 

The current success of the animal café is part of a larger explosion of interest in goods, businesses, and places that offer positive, healing experiences: known in Japan as the “iyashi” boom.  All of the factors that make animal cafés so appealing to customers - the opportunity to interact with animals, a space within which customers can relax and chat with friends, the cozy feel - are involved in making an animal café a place to receive iyashi. Iyashi, the noun form of the verb iyasu, to cure, fix, soothe, is usually translated as “healing” but it carries the connotation of both physical and mental mending.

The term first came into common parlance during the "iyashi boom," which began in the mid-1990s. The timeline of the boom and interest in iyashi is correlated with Japan’s “Lost Decade” (the period following the end of the bubble economy, 1990 to the early 2000s), and the rise of economic and social instability as Japanese society attempted to restructure in response to the crash and depression. The iyashi boom is generally seen by scholars to have been catalyzed by two major events in 1995: the Kobe Earthquake and the Tokyo sarin gas attacks. The Kobe Earthquake, a 6.9 tremor that hit the densely populated city of Kobe, led to more than 5000 deaths and caused an unprecedented level of destruction in Japan at that time. An earthquake of that magnitude damages people’s sense of the stability in their lives, as even the ground beneath their feet was unstable. The second event, a series of terrorist attacks in which poisonous gas was released in the subways of Japan’s capital, Tokyo, caused the kind of widespread fear that terrorism is designed to evince. This was exacerbated by the fact that many people, living busy, urban, isolated lives, had no place to turn to receive the emotional support that would ameliorate this sense of fear. The growing unease of economically unstable workers coincided with events that sharply undermined individuals’ faith that everything would be okay.

The word iyashi was first coined by the Japanese anthropologist Noriyuki Ueda in his ethnography on a Sri Lankan village entitled "Suri Ranka no Akuma barai - ime-ji to iyashi no consumoroji- (Image, Healing and Cosmology in Sri Lanka)," published in 1990. The first major usage of the word in the media was by a newspaper editor referring to Ueda's work and his piece explored iyashi's dual meaning as both heart and body healing. The flexibility inherent in the loose definition of the word has meant that it is both difficult to classify as an idea and that it is easily applied to a variety of different situations, which has led to the idea being applied in many contexts in Japan. An iyashi experience is an experience that is a combination of excitement and relaxation. Japanese individuals seeking out iyashi are attempting to both disconnect from their daily stresses, and to connect to something outside themselves. This may mean being connected to more abstract feelings such as nature or salvation, or, for individuals feeling more directly isolated, it may be about connecting to other people or other creatures, like animals. Usage of the word iyashi surged in media discourse following the disasters of the mid-1990s, as the Japanese populace experienced a surge of interest in healing from the traumas of those events. The word went from 2 uses of the word in Japan’s three major Japanese newspapers - the Mainichi Shinbun, the Yomiuri Shinbun and the Asahi Shinbun – in 1990, to dozens in 1995. By 1999, the word was named one of the top ten buzzwords of the year at the sixteenth Ryūkō go taishō (Buzzword awards) by the Jiyukokuminsha publishing house.

Today, iyashi is often used as something of a catch-phrase, a hip concept that will attract the eye of consumers. An ad campaign in 2015 designed to draw travelers to Kamakura to see the hydrangeas blooming, a flower for which the area is known, showed a wave of multi-colored blooms and the slogan “Iyashi, in full bloom” (Iyashi, mankai), [Figure 8] using the idea of iyashi to market a day out. The currant usage of the term iyashi is used to evoke positive feelings and mark any experience as one that will make one feel good. The sense of feeling good is closely aligned with a sense of stress reduction and restoring mental balance, but it is flexible enough to be applied to spiritual or religious activities or to the experience of relaxing in an animal café. With this definition, one can see how a spiritual retreat, a visit to the gardens of Kamakura or a trip to a maid café can all be considered iyashi experiences.

The boom period was characterized largely by Japanese people seeking out iyashi, or experiences that would allow them to feel iyasarete iru (healed), through an embrace of alternative medicines or therapies, or “New New Religions (shinshiruhukyo 新新宗教)” such as Naikan. During this period, iyashi goods, like scented oils or home foot spas, and iyashi experiences, like aromatherapy, or power spot tours (also known as kijō, 気場), which take visitors to powerful places to draw on the land’s positive energy, focused on offering healing through soothing emotional stress.

Over the course of the last two decades the term has shifted away from spiritual security and wellbeing and towards psychological balance and health (Matsui 2009, Roquet 2009). Animal cafés are a type of this kind of iyashi business. Where earlier iyashi businesses focused on emotional anxiety and physical tension, animal cafés focus on problems caused by social disconnection. These businesses focus on offering healing through relaxation away from the social relations at work that can be a source of stress, and as a chance to combat the loneliness of returning to an empty home by spending time surrounded by others.

 




[1]U-Can Shingo Ryukogo Taisho. "16th Ryukogo Taisho (Buzzword Awards)". singo.jiyu.co.jp. http://singo.jiyu.co.jp/nendo/1999.html (retrieved Aug. 5 2016).

 

Pages

  • <
  • Page
  • 3
  • of 6
  • >