After the Cats

Ohisama doesn’t look like much—small space, a few tables, shakes and ice cream on the menu. The rabbits are just moving around the floor the way rabbits do, unhurried and completely indifferent to the fact that you paid 1000 yen to sit with them for half an hour.

I watched one rabbit for a long time that had apparently decided my shoes were a problem worth investigating. It kept approaching, checking the laces, losing interest, coming back. There’s something about that specific focus—not affection, not even really engagement, just the mechanical curiosity of a rabbit encountering something slightly foreign. You take photos because the experience needs documentation somehow, but the photos never quite catch it.

Rabbit cafes are the logical step after cat cafes, which were everywhere by the time I even noticed them. There’s a progression to these things in Japan—what starts as a clever idea becomes infrastructure. Someone had the thought that people wanted access to animals without consequence, in a space designed around it, and now it exists as a category. Cats first, then rabbits. I wonder what’s next. Something smaller probably. Something equally soft and pointless.

There’s something genuinely generous about the concept, separate from whatever Instagram appeal it carries. A cafe that exists just to let you sit with animals for a while. No adoption, no responsibility, just half an hour with creatures that don’t care you’re there. It’s companionship without the weight.

Maybe that’s the whole thing—that they don’t care. You’re not the reason they’re here. That might be exactly why people come.