I’ve heard Japan is a very cat friendly nation. At the very least in the abstract. I’m interested to learn more about Japanese culture related to cats.
Firstly, I’m curious if Japan leans towards indoor or outdoor cats. As an American living in the UK, this point interests me as there’s such a stark division between the country I grew up in compared to the country I live in, and not in the way one might expect.
I’m also really curious if stray (homeless) cats are common in Japan.
I’m also interested in the “ownership rate” (let’s be honest, it’s difficult to “own” a cat) in Japan. And attitudes towards cats and pets in general.
Thanks for any helpful responses ☺️
https://www.reddit.com/r/japan/comments/wxjfhy/cats_in_japan/
2 comments
Surprisingly, Netflix’s The Mind of a Cat actually goes into cat ownership in Japan.
I’m pulling numbers from a study I remember from a while back, they may not be entirely accurate. I think there are something like 10 million pet cats in Japan, 90% of them being indoor cats. It’s a bigger number than I always expected, but then again indoor cats are pretty invisible.
Feral cats are also very common in many places; way more than I ever saw growing up in the suburban United States. There have been more visible efforts in recent years to catch, fix, and re-release them, but it still doesn’t seem to be as commonplace as similar programs in the US.
Attitudes towards feral cats seem to be similar to what you’d expect most other places that aren’t super hostile towards them: some people actively feed them, some people don’t mind them, some people think they’re a nuisance, and unfortunately some people have no qualms about abusing or killing them.
“Feral” cats in Japan, especially in urban areas, seem *way* more socialized to humans than strays I’ve seen elsewhere; that may just be confirmation bias, since obviously the non-socialized ones are going to give humans a wide berth. In some places they seem to be tolerated more in the sense as “community cats” (though of course that still doesn’t mean everybody likes them).