Nekobukuro

I've identified a travel information gap that needs to be filled.  In most guidebooks about Japan, tourists learn about places to stay, places to eat and shrines/temples/gardens to visit.  They don't learn anything about the most bizarre parts of Japan, one of which I visited the other day with my friend.

As some background, my friend and I had met up for dinner and to see a Limpicka gallery exhibition in Shibuya and we'd decided to meet up the next day.  I asked her for an activity recommendation and specified that it should be something that I could do in Japan and nowhere else.  She kind of tilted her head to one side, thought for a few mintues, and hesitantly offered the suggestion of a 猫カフェー, or a cat cafe...... I had no idea what a cat cafe was.  Some background about this girl is necessary... she's Japanese, but went to the U.S. for most of high school and for college, so she knows very well what parts of Japanese culture are not seen as weird so much here but are seen as very weird from the eyes of an American.  Great friend to have when living alone in an unfamiliar place!  Anyway... she thought that a cat cafe would fit the bill, and so we went.

The place was called Nekobukuro. The name of the place is an unsuccessful attempt at cleverness, since it's located in near a station called Ikebukuro and they've substituted the Ike for Neko, which means cat.  If you translate the characters, it means cat bag.  It's located on the top floor of a high rise department store, and the idea is that you pay ¥500 for some feline company.  This is Tokyo though, so what it really means is that you crowd into a room packed with people and try to hunt down a kind of sad looking, ill kept cat (most of which are desperately trying to hide from you because of the nature of their miserable lives) and try to pet it.  If you click here you can see photos and introductions of all of the cats owned by Nekobukuro.

The whole thing from concept to name is just creepy to Americans (or maybe just me), but it's totally ok for many Japanese people, many of whom would like to own a pet but don't have the time or space to keep one.  Instead, they just pay to interact with animals for brief periods of time.  So... one the one hand, I get the non-creepy reasons of why this place exists, but on the other hand.... just can't shake the creepiness.  This one wasn't actually a cafe, but she told me that many of them serve tea or coffee, which you drink while having polite conversation and petting the cats.

Please take a gander at some kind of sad, upsetting photographs of nekobukuro.