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Cat café


A cat café is a theme café whose attraction is cats that can be watched and played with. Patrons pay a cover fee, generally hourly, and thus cat cafés can be seen as a form of supervised indoor pet rental.

Cat café has been officially recognized in the online edition of the Oxford Dictionary of English since August 2015.

The world's first cat café, "Cat Flower Garden" (貓花園), opened its doors in Taipei, Taiwan, in 1998. The Taiwanese cat café eventually became a tourist destination, attracting tourists from Japan as well as all over the globe. Though the origin of cat café is in Taiwan, the concept blossomed in Japan, where the first one named "Neko no Jikan" (lit. "Cat's Time") was opened in Osaka in 2004. Due to the Japan's land size and population, many residents live in small apartments or condominiums which do not allow pets, making a cat café a very popular destination for young workers looking for the companionship and comfort offered. Tokyo's first cat café, named "Neko no mise" (Shop of Cats), opened in 2005. After this, the popularity of cat cafés boomed in Japan. From 2005 to 2010, seventy-nine cat cafés opened across the country.

In the United Kingdom animal charities disagree on whether cat cafés are a suitable environment for cats with the RSPCA, Cats Protection and the Celia Hammond Animal Trust criticizing them for keeping large numbers of cats in a confined space with a revolving population of people. International Cat Care takes a more positive view saying "It is a difficult environment to get right but it's not impossible by any means". However all the charities agree that cat cafés need to be properly regulated.

Cat cafés are quite popular in Japan, with Tokyo being home to 58 cat cafés as of 2015. The first was Cat's Store (猫の店 Neko no Mise?), by Norimasa Hanada, which opened in 2005. The popularity of cat cafés in Japan is attributed to many apartments forbidding pets, and to cats providing relaxing companionship in what may otherwise be a stressful and lonesome urban life. Other forms of pet rental, such as rabbit cafés, are also common in Japan.


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