At the end of February 2025, a video about an unusual service allegedly available in some establishments in Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto circulated on social networks and the media. We have checked how reliable this information is.
The video shows a woman getting a massage in a salon while a cat lies next to her. The masseuse lifts the blanket, helping the animal move onto the visitor’s back, and then they continue to work together: the cat kneads the client’s back with its paws, and the masseuse stretches her legs. The authors of the posts add that a similar service is available in some Japanese cat cafes for 1,500 yen per hour. The video was published by such Telegram channels as “Ax+"(1.7 million views at the time of writing this analysis), "Trending today"(159,000), "Koteyka"(123,000), "Flash"(104,000), "Drain Rat" (109,000) and "Komsomolskaya Pravda: KP.RU"(61,000). A video with a cat massage therapist appeared on the TV channel "Moscow 24", it was published in "Zene", Instagram and on entertainment sites.
A cat café, or cat café, is a space where people can enjoy interacting with cats. The first such establishment in the world counts Cat Flower Garden, which opened in Taipei in 1998. A few years later, cat cafes appeared in Japan and became extremely popular there. As a rule, in such spaces you can play with cats, pet them and treat them with special snacks. Some establishments even give clients the opportunity to take a nap surrounded by cats, but Verified was unable to find a single cat cafe that offered its clients massage performed by animals. The Cat Republic in Osaka has Cat Spa program, the price of which is the same as that indicated in the posts with the viral video, but does not involve any actual spa treatments. For 1,500 yen, the client will simply stay with the cats in a room decorated in retro style of Japanese public baths. As the program description on the website states, “a cat spa is like forest bathing or sunbathing. You will be surrounded by cats, which has a beneficial effect on your physical and mental well-being.”
This is not the first time that a video with a cat massage therapist has gone viral. Previously, he appeared in both Russian-language media and social networks, and in English-speaking, however, the location of the shooting was not indicated anywhere. The earliest publication of this video that we were able to find in the Russian-language segment of the Internet dates back to June 3, 2016: on this day his posted publication “Medusa” in the entertainment section “Shapito”. Attached to the note was a video inserted into the text of the article from Facebook, but now no longer available.
Sultan Suleymanov, who was then the editor of the “Shapito” column, shared with “Verified” link for that video. Unfortunately, there are no archived copies of it, although the Facebook profile itself where it was posted continues publish posts. “Judging by the fact that there are no details in the note in Chapiteau - neither the name of the “spa center”, as I called it, nor the name of the cat (it is always important to clarify the name of the cat!), I based all my guesses for this text on the video I saw,” said Suleymanov. “Of course, it would be more accurate to write that the animal simply stomped on the visitor’s back, but it was funnier to assume that the cat works there, and as soon as the world learns about this service, she will have no end to clients.”
In addition, the imgur website preserved GIF animation, published June 1, 2016. Its source is the same video that Meduza referred to two days later. This GIF has 76,000 views. Two days after “Medusa” the same video published a YouTuber, it has over 400,000 views.
Using a reverse image search, Verified determined that the logo in the upper left corner of the frame belongs to a Japanese television show Wan-Nyan Club (“Cat and Dog Club”), which aired on the BS Nippon channel from 2014 to 2017. We also found article on a Japanese website, which stated that the Wan-Nyan Club segment was first broadcast on December 9, 2014. The video was allegedly filmed at the Parbine Hikari beauty salon in Hikari City, Yamaguchi Prefecture, and the cat in it was actually a cat named Nya.
On the website Parbine There is no information about this cat or about cat massage services. However, it turned out that from 2013 to 2020, the owner of Parbine Hikari blogged on the platform Ameblo. And there they actually found photographs of exactly the same cat (against the background of exactly the same wallpaper) as in the viral video. On February 22, 2015, the blog was published recording with a story about her:
“In Parbine Hikari there lives a cat Nya-chan, also known as the idol cat Nya-chan. Nya-chan adores the salon's clients and greets them with her “Nya-ya-ya!” But that's not all! She loves to lie on the couch next to clients during treatments, and sometimes even gives them massages. Nya is a cat cosmetologist!”
Thanks to the fact that the owner of the salon often talked about Nya-chan’s habits on the Internet, the cat attracted the attention of journalists. “Verified” could not find information on the blog about her filming for Wan-Nyan Club, but it says that she took part in the program twice Mezamashi Doyoubi Fuji TV channel (in February And July 2014). Perhaps one of these footage was later used on the air of Wan-Nyan Club (or the owner of the salon sent her own video to the editors of the program). Besides, Nya-chan was guest one of the TV show episodes Tensai! Shimura Doubutsuen, but it was filmed in a studio in Tokyo rather than in a salon.
Together with Nya-chan, another cat lived in the salon - Mi-chan. She, judging by the blog entries, too sometimes went out to clients, but did it less often. “Verified” was unable to find out the further fate of Nya-chan and Mi-chan: the salon’s blog and pages on social networks had not been updated for a long time, and in recent years other cats appeared there (but they no longer communicated with clients as closely as Nya-chan did).
Thus, Japanese cat cafes do not offer cat massage services. The video that went viral was filmed in the mid-2010s and showed the cat Nya-chan, who lived in the Japanese beauty salon Parbine and sometimes gave massages to its clients - simply because she liked it.
Cover photo: screenshot of a viral video. Source: Telegram
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