Tarm: You're strange or a city dweller. Everyone that's not a, well, person that have grown up in a city buy their cats, dogs, rabbits and so forth from a neighbour or someone they know that have a animal that have recently delivered.
I live in pretty much what could be termed "inaka" or countryside. But even then the only place you can buy pets here is from pet stores. Most people can't even have pets due to laws, regulations and so forth preventing them from having a pet in their home.
This is certainly a far cry to the UK where we used to have literally 10s of cats at a time (I think the most we had at one time was 50 or so). but then, we were breeders of pedigree show quality cats.
Kingoftherings: Go to an animal shelter. They practically give them away.
No animal shelters near here. And even the places that do have them; they still charge several hundred dollars (or equivalent). And to that end, I haven't seen a single stray animal here in almost a decade.
It's sad to think that the only affordable pet in Japan, unless you're really willing to put down 100,000 to half a million yen or so on a dog or cat, is a gold fish. Seriously, the prices here for pretty much anything are seriously fucked up compared to almost any other country. And they wonder why we're in deflation. Here's a hint Mr. Hatoyama, it's because, unlike you, we don't get handed millions of yen each month by our mother. Not all of us can afford the stupid prices attached to everything.
Still, looking back to the cats I used to have, I'd have to say our blue-eyed and odd-eyed whites were the best. And we were fairly luck in that only one of the blue-eyed cats was deaf. Oh, the fun of trying to get a deaf cat out of a tree =)