Social distancing fun: Diners sharing tables with capybaras!

Coronavirus lockdowns and stay-at-home orders are coming to an end around the world. For many of us, confinement stress is transforming into anxiety over how to keep safe in a COVID-19 world. Aiming to keep the mood light, a restaurant in Japan is using capybaras to help maintain social distancing between diners.

Instead of using real-life South American rodents, the restaurant is using soft toy versions of them – and of lesser pandas – and is placing them in seats next to and opposite diners to naturally create social distance between them.

The restaurant, called Forest Animal Restaurant Gibbon-tei, is part of the Izu Shaboten Zoo, located about 100 kilometers southwest of Tokyo. Capybaras are one of the exhibits there, where the semiaquatic animals spend a lot of their time in an outdoor bath.

Eating as a form of entertainment

Gibbon-tei introduced the soft toys in 2018 when it renovated under the theme of ‘eating as an entertainment.’ The cuddly toys joined customers at their tables to help them relax. Now that role continues as they fill in the gaps of an otherwise half-empty restaurant. Fluffy pink toy flamingoes fly overhead to keep the mood bright too.

The soft toys, and the tables and chairs are disinfected each time a party of customers leaves. The zoo reopened on May 16 after being closed during a state of emergency due to the spread of the new coronavirus.

Staying six Fennec Foxes apart

The zoo offers a handy guide to remind us of the social distancing requirements: two meters, it says, is roughly equivalent to the length of two capybaras, which is also about the length of two Southern Anteaters, or roughly six Fennec Foxes.

As well as being cute and Instagrammable, the toys serve a deeper purpose. While we are still learning how to live with the threat of COVID-19, many of us are likely experiencing a constant low-level anxiety that can make it harder to cope emotionally. Creating a natural physical distance, rather than having to remind customers to maintain it, eases that tension. It continues the Japanese tradition of ‘omotenashi,’ where one shows hospitality toward a guest by anticipating their needs and catering to them in advance.

Empathy really never goes out of style and it’s what we need most now.