This is a culture where the things that every human secretly wants - that every human secretly needs - are acknowledged, celebrated and catered for instead of furtively hidden away. Pleasure is made an event, instead of something to be ashamed of. There are cubicles you can rent by the hour to watch videos and drink tea under a heated blanket when you're bored; there are capsule rooms you can rent to take a nap in at lunchtime when you're hungover. Love hotels - one of the country's biggest money spinners - are glossy, romantic hotels designed for couples to use; pay by the hour from an anonymous vending machine at the front, complete with little face washes and hair brushes to tidy up when you're finished. In England, thousands of teenagers use passport photobooths to take 'creative' photos with their friends; in Japan, they have designated creative photobooths for teenagers, complete with an inbuilt photoshop to cover up the spots. In England, people convert to Christianity for five minutes so that they can get married in a pretty church; in Japan, they skip the hypocrisy and simply build beautiful, non-secular registration offices that look like churches that anyone - regardless of faith or religion - can get married in. We all like to soak in a hot bath, so in Japan they scrap five foot tubs filled with grotty tap water, and create twenty foot oak lined public tubs filled with bubbling mineral water. There is no human desire that Japan does not acknowledge and then - without shame, without embarrassment - rejoice in, simplify and beautify.
Today, however, I experienced possibly the pinnacle of this culture; something that could not exist in England, simply because it the rationality of it is so devastatingly Japanese.
"We're going to a cat cafe," my friend said while we were wandering around Harijuku after lunch. "I need a coffee."
"Okydoky," I replied, because - frankly - I'm not that bothered by what I do, as long as it's something I've not done before. And I needed a coffee.
We climbed to the top of a high office block, and then queued for 20 minutes outside a room that looked - unsurprisingly - very much like an office.
"So," I said eventually, after 15 minutes of waiting in line (there are lines for everything in Japan: if there isn't, it's probably not worth bothering with). "Cat cafe, hey. Is it cat themed or something?"
"Not exactly," my friend said as we were ushered into the room and had 1,000 yen taken from each of us.
She was right: it wasn't cat themed at all. It was simply a room, with chairs, filled with cats. Real, live cats; sleeping, playing lethargically with toy mice, lolling around and occasionally trying to hump each other. We had paid 1,000 yen to drink a cup of tea and sit, for an hour, stroking cats.
"We just pat them?" I said to my friend in confusion.
"Yep."
"And then what happens?"
"Nothing. We just pat them and then we go home."
"So it's really a...." I thought about it. "It's a kind of intensive cat-fix centre."
"Yep," my friend said, prodding affectionately at a particularly sleepy white one in a very large and fluffy pink tower.
"You'd never pay eight quid in England to stroke a flamin' cat," I muttered, and sat in a chair to drink my tea. "You'd just go and find one on a street corner somewhere."
After fifteen minutes of confused and cynical patting, however, it all suddenly started making sense. The music was low and soothing; the room was warm and filled with the smell of coffee; the cats were... well, not affectionate, exactly, but lethargic and generally bored enough to be pretty amenable to anything. And - as I stroked, and told them they were cute, and played with the feather attached to a stick they gave me - I realised I had missed it; that I had missed interacting with an animal, and the calm and homey-feeling that cats automatically encourage, just by being there. That I had missed being able to relax with a cat on my lap, even if it wasn't my cat; missed playing with one, and laughing when it chewed on my jumper, even if I had no idea what its name was. And that Japan had somehow known I needed that feeling, and had designed a room specifically for it.
Japan, to some, seems crazy, eccentric, hedonistic, but to me it makes sense. Perhaps it has one of the world's lowest crime rates simply because it represses nothing, and encourages everything; there is no concept of sin as long as nobody is hurt in the process, so there is nothing left to rebel against, and no boredom to alleviate. And - in contrast to a western world filled with psychoanalysts who are trained to make us understand ourselves in the most forced, complicated way possible - it's a culture that does that in a simple, beautiful, hedonistically childlike way.
It's true that in England, if you want to stroke a cat and don't actually have a cat, you find one on a street corner, give it a furtive pat on the head as you walk past and hope its owner doesn't notice. And - okay - it doesn't cost eight quid a pop, but it doesn't feel as good either. It doesn't satisfy the bit inside you that really just needs to cuddle a cat for a minute.
And a culture that knows that, even if it charges you for it? That, to me, is a culture worth celebrating.
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