Thursday, April 09, 2009

Not with a Bang but a Miaow   [Mark Steyn]

A demographic vignette from Tokyo:

“She’s the prettiest girl we have at our cafe. Everybody wants to touch her, but we ask that customers only do so if she doesn't resist you,” a waitress told me.

She didn’t resist. And since I was paying for the privilege, I leaned in and stroked her cheek. She was as lovely as the waitress had promised: a big-eyed, silky soft, compliant 2-year-old Russian Blue cat.

I was at Calico, one of Tokyo’s increasingly popular cat cafes, where customers seeking human and feline companionship pay to sip tea and stroke one of the 20-odd resident cats, representing 17 different breeds.

In an increasingly childless and aging nation, cat cafes fill a void.

In The Children of Men, P. D. James's dystopian novel of a world unable to breed, cats are highly prized: In a land without babies, divorced couples battle for legal custody of "fecund domestic animals," and the fonts of Anglican churches are used for the christenings of pets:

Each of the women was carrying a white bundle wrapped in a shawl beneath which fell the lace-trimmed pleated folds of christening robes...The two kittens, ears flattened beneath the ribboned bonnets, looked both ridiculous and endearing... He wondered if they had been drugged, then decided they had probably been handled, caressed and carried like babies since birth and were accustomed to it.

Strange how in a mere decade-and-a-half almost every one of Baroness James's futuristic fancies has become an observable phenomenon.

04/09 10:46 AMShare