Professional staff are breeding and breeding

26 April, 2023 | Osaka, Japan

This was mainly a rest/plan/write day - at this point, I was only just starting to write about the beaches of Sydney - with one actual scheduled thing I could not miss.

But before that, I hit up the Kuromon market again for a late lunch.

Beyond this, my day was mostly uneventful until I headed north for my appointment around 4pm. As mentioned previously, north of Namba is mostly a “barren wasteland of [vile] fashion”.

There is literally no reason to come to this place unless you happen to be missing a dog that is a bit like a little piggy:

I was. So I found the next best thing to pet in Osaka.

The micropig cafe in question - mipig.cafe - has 14 locations in Japan and my hour there cost about $20. Their main website goes into significant detail on the origin, history, and nature of their business - which includes selling them as pets:

Currently, we operate farms at 3 bases in Japan. Under the guidance of the managed veterinarian and livestock health and hygiene center, professional staff are breeding and breeding.

While many of the pigs are quite “micro” as above, they can get up there in size and weight. Those larger pigs have a tendency to muscle the others away to take the prime lap real estate, and a few got into fights about it.

The reality is that these are pigs and petting them feels quite different than a dog and thus this did very little to make me miss petting Bunny less. That said, I would recommend this as the only kind of pig I would accept at, say, Pride celebrations.

At this point I was kinda running out of novel things to do in Osaka - major tourist sites hit, interesting areas explored, etc. But that timing is perfectly fine; tomorrow I’ll be jumping on another insanely fast train to Kyoto, the site of imperial administration prior to the Meiji era with roughly 897345 shrines and palaces.

So to cap off the evening I revisited my favorite LGBTQ bar, Pokapokaya: