Japanese Animal Cafes and the Iyashi Boom

Commodifying Intimacy

While the iyashi boom has driven the success of animal cafés, their specific structure is primarily shaped by earlier business types that commodified intimacy in Japan during the 1980s and 1990s. Anthropologists have done significant research on a variety of these businesses and the way they encourage customers to purchase intimacy in a club or café setting, from hostess clubs in the 1980s to host clubs in the 1990s and maid cafés in the 2000s (Allison 1994; Galbraith 2013; Takeyama 2016). The business models in these spaces are based on traditional commodity exchange, as visitors are paying for the food and drink they consume, but the prices were obviously and heavily marked up. Visitors are willing to pay that cost because it gains them to attention and focus of the host, hostess, or maid.

In contrast, animal café visitors pay to enter the café, with the entrance cost frequently including a free drink or unlimited drinks at a modest fee, but do not have to pay in order to keep the attention of the animals. Once they have entered the space, they can lay claim to it, using it as if it were their home without having to continuing make new purchases to retain the attention of the workers, as you do in a host or hostess club. Animal cafés are not cheap to visit, averaging about $10 for an hour’s stay, especially for young people without significant discretionary funds, but they are more inexpensive than other outings and activities (and much cheaper than a host or hostess club). In addition, the rate decreases the longer one stays, so the price can be very reasonable for a devoted visitor. This means that the visitors most in need of the positive feelings of relaxation and companionship provided by the animal café, who are also often the most financially unstable, are able to receive more from time in the space without additional cost.

Also, in contrast to other type of intimacy businesses, in an animal café the experience that attracts customers is built around interaction with animals, which creates an easy sense of familiarity and removes the sense of social anxiety that can come from interactions with people, who may be judgmental [Figure 7]. Free from prescribed behaviors, these are spaces for customers to be selfish, to focus on their own needs and interests, and to be free from the responsibility to be attentive to the needs of others. Customers pay to enter, socialize as little or as much as they wish, and leave, recuperated and more able to face the demands of the world outside the café walls.