Cat kotatsu let your feline friends relax through winter the Japanese way【Photos】

Kitty-sized furniture comes bundled with a huge supply of winter snacks for their human caretakers.

Winter is here, and in Japan that means it’s time to enjoy world-class skiing and snowboarding, plus beautiful outdoor events like Christmas decoration displays and the sculptures of the Sapporo Snow Festival. Or, if you can’t stand cold weather, it’s time to park yourself at a kotatsu, one of Japan’s low tables with a blankets and a heater attached to the underside, and wait for spring.

However, Wakayama Prefecture-based company Chicken Nakata wants your feline friends to have a kotatsu of their own too.

As you might have guessed from the name, Chicken Nakata is actually a food product company, and some of their best-sellers are mikan (mandarin oranges), a specialty of Wakayama. Because mikan are at their most delicious in winter, they’re a popular snack to take with you for a kotatsu-sitting session (grabbing snacks ahead of time is key, because once your legs are nice and toasty, you won’t want to get out), and Chicken Nakata’s president, who’s a cat lover himself, wanted to sell “mikan for people who like cats.”

So the company came up with the idea of including a miniature, cat-sized kotatsu with orders for five-kilogram (11-pound) boxes of its mikan!

This is actually Chicken Nakata’s second year to offer the feline furniture. Last year, it quickly sold out of its stock of 1,000 cat kotatsu, so hopefully they’ve beefed up their inventory this time around.

However, while it’s being advertised as a “cat kotatsu,” the unit isn’t equipped with a heater, which might be for the best, since it precludes the possibility of your cat suffering any low-temperature burns. Chicken Nakata also says that, based on customer feedback, they’ve made the tabletop sturdier and the legs longer, compared to last year’s model.

The bundled set, called Neko to Kotatsu to Omoide Mikan (Cats, Kotatsu, and Mikan of My Memories), is being offered for 4,236 yen (US$39) directly from Chicken Nakata (here) as well as on Rakuten (here), plus for the higher price of 5,380 yen on Amazon (here). Technically you’re paying for the oranges and the cat kotatsu is the promotional extra, but if you want to think of it as buying the cat kotatsu and getting five kilos of produce for free, that sounds like a pretty sweet deal too.

Source: PR Times via Japaaan
Top image: PR Times
Insert images: PR Times, Chicken Nakata
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