Cats to Crickets: Pets in Japan's Floating World February 6, 2013

Urban commoners in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Japan, known as the Floating World, enjoyed a hedonistic lifestyle that included the pleasure of the companionship of pet animals. Many woodblock prints of fashionable beauties show them accompanied by elegant, pampered pets that symbolize luxury and sensuality. Formerly a prerogative of the nobility, pets were now available to newly affluent commoners as well.