Posts Tagged ‘fad’
Tokyo cat cafes not just for old bats with cats
Sip a latte, flip through a manga, surf the Internet — or have a cuddle with a feline friend at one of Tokyo’s many cat cafés.
On first glance, these popular hangouts appear to be normal, cozy cafés, with sofas, coffee cups and shelves of magazines.
Look closer, however, and you’ll find something curious — all types of cats (“neko” in Japanese) reclining on top of drink machines, in corner baskets or in the laps of patrons.
At Tokyo’s cat cafés, catmosphere comes first, coffee a distant second.
Neko cafés are a relatively recent development in Japan…
About 100 neko cafés can be found in Japan, according to the nekocafe map, with a few outliers in South Korea and Taiwan. More than 50 of the cafes are in Tokyo proper, with almost 70 in the greater Tokyo area…
Paying money to hang out with cats (the average cost is about $12 an hour) may seem like a strange concept best suited to batty old ladies with frizzy hair and multiple scarves, but customers tell a different story…
The popularity of neko cafés as date spots is corroborated by a visit to Shimokitazawa’s Cateriam, where lace-skirted young women and their mohawked men ooh and ahh over the kitty antics…
The cat café boom has spawned countless blogs documenting cat café stars. Some cats even have their own mixi profiles.
One blogger, a Japanese amateur photographer who calls himself Jack, says he goes to cat cafés because he likes watching his favorite cats grow up…
With cat cafés proliferating around Japan, you can decide for yourself.
Not in Japan? Start one where you live. Just take the money and run before the fad decides to be unfashionable.
Seems to me more than impolite, even thoughtless, to subject your cat to public manipulation just so you might meet someone of the human persuasion you’d like to spend time with. In addition to your cat.
Food tattoos – tasty or just plain demented?
There is a tattoo trend afoot. We’ve had dolphins, ancient symbols, “ironic” sailor tattoos and now I give you … the food tattoo…
When Lulu Grimes of Olive magazine Twittered these food tattoos I thought it was a pretty funny joke. But it turns out these are real tattoos. As in, these people are stuck with them forever.
Don’t get me wrong, I love food. I spend much too much time planning what I will eat next and have many favourite foods. Most of them involve cheese. But, never in all my days of scraping the last crumb of Stilton off the rind, have I considered marking my love of the stinky cheese in a permanent fashion.
The shaven-headed man pictured above loves fried breakfasts so much that he sports a full English on his shiny pate. At least he could grow his hair back to cover it up, although the thought of a baked bean peeking out of his parting makes me feel a little nauseous. A woman has a cherry-topped cupcake on her foot, but look a little closer and the cherry is a skull. Sinister. And weird. Yet another shows a piece of toast, complete with smiling face, spreading itself with jam. The toast looks happy enough, I wonder whether the owner of the tat is quite so jolly?
