Meet Lara and Terence. They are uber-experienced travel writers currently on a 12-month mission to travel the world, Slowly. What Lara and Terence don’t know about the world could be written on the back of a holiday postcard stamp. It’s them we have to thank for today’s Slow Travel idea – a trip to a cat café in Tokyo. Yes, do not adjust your TV sets, you read that right.
What’s so Slow about a cat café? Well, slow travel isn’t about getting a slow boat to China or hitching a ride on a tortoise to Timbuktu. It’s about taking the time to immerse yourself in the local culture of your destination, however you got there. It’s meeting the locals, walking their walk and experiencing the world in it’s natural, un-homogenised richness.
Far be it from me to leap to a national sterotype, but can you get more kooky, cute and 21st Century Japanese than a Tokyo cat café? I think not.
As Lara and Terence explain on their website Grantourismotravels.com, cat cafés are springing up all over the city, thanks to Japanese girls’ penchant for small cute things and a widespread rental housing policy which forbids the keeping of pets at home.
For cat-lovers there simply is no other option but to spend Y600 an hour therapeutically stroking someone else’s moggy.
Some cafés even have a menu of cats so that you can pick your favourite breed, or match one with your cheesecake. We love the idea but do keep our fingers crossed that the cats are loved and looked after.
Lara and Terence visited Calico Cat Café in Shinjuku, where they charge Y600 per person for an hour or Y900 for 90 minutes. They write:
“When we visited around 8pm one evening (the place was packed with locals), all of our favourites, the Persian cats, spent most of the time sleeping, and there’s a rule (among many) that you have to let a sleeping cat lie, so we had to settle for dangling toys in front of the others instead.”
There are enough cat cafes in Tokyo now to have your pick of spots that match your mood. Choose from chilled out dens to activity playgrounds. Just don’t be surprised if an hour turns into two and then three. Jeez those kitties are cute!
Image: Grantourismotravels.com
Read Lara and Terence’s cat cafés blog post
