The Business of Sitting With Cats

Tokyo’s cat cafés make perfect sense once you understand the apartment situation: most rental contracts prohibit pets, the units are small enough that a cat would constitute a significant roommate, and the city runs on the kind of sustained pressure that makes sitting quietly in a room full of animals sound like genuine medicine. You pay somewhere between ten and twenty-five euros for the hour, order a warm strawberry milk, and let a stranger’s cat decide whether you’re worth approaching. Some of the better establishments rescue strays and rehabilitate them—the cats are working through their own things, which gives the whole arrangement a certain mutuality. You’re both in recovery. A Canadian YouTuber named Sharla was studying in Japan at the time and documented several of them, and the footage is exactly what you’d expect: achingly calm, slightly surreal, full of cats who could not care less that they’re being filmed.