Coffee Life in Japan 9780520952485

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Coffee Life in Japan

C a lifor n i a St udies i n Food a n d Cult u r e Darra Goldstein, Editor

Coffee Life in Japan

Merry White

U ni v ersi t y of C a lifor ni a Pr ess Berkeley  •  Los Angeles 

 London

•

For Gus

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2012 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data White, Merry I., 1941–   Coffee life in Japan / Merry White.    p.   cm. —(California studies in food and culture ; 36)   Includes bibliographical references and index.   isbn 978-0-520-25933-1 (cloth : alk. paper)   isbn 978-0-520-27115-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)   1. Coffee—Social aspects—Japan.  2. Coffeehouses— Social aspects—Japan.  3. Popular culture—Japan.   4. Japan—Social life and customs.  I. Title.   gt2919.j3w55 2012  641.3'3730952—dc23 2011033139 Manufactured in the United States of America 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Rolland Enviro100, a 100% post-consumer fiber paper that is FSC certified, deinked, processed chlorine-free, and manufactured with renewable biogas energy. It is acid-free and EcoLogo certified.

Contents

Illustrations Preface 1. Coffee in Public: Cafés in Urban Japan

vii ix

1

2. Japan’s Cafés: Coffee and the Counterintuitive

19

3. Modernity and the Passion Factory

42

4. Masters of Their Universes: Performing Perfection

66

5. Japan’s Liquid Power

89

6. Making Coffee Japanese: Taste in the Contemporary Café

108

7. Urban Public Culture: Webs, Grids, and Third Places in Japanese Cities

127

8. Knowing Your Place

157

Appendix: Visits to Cafés, an Unreliable Guide Notes Bibliography Acknowledgments Index

173 179 193 205 207

Illustrations

1. Efish café  / 2 2. Monument to Tei Ei-kei  /  8 3. Shinshindo  /  20 4. Café François  / 31 5. Kissa Soiree  / 43 6. Ryugetsudo classical music café  / 48 7. Ryugetsudo, with stuffed animals  / 61 8. The coffee master at Hanafusa  / 67 9. Noda-san at Otafuku  / 83 10. Sa-chan at Kafekosen  / 84 11. Kafekosen  / 85 12. Coffee apparatus  / 90 13. Hanafusa café  / 109 14. Ambient Café Mole (exterior)  / 117 15. Ambient Café Mole (interior)  / 124 16. Alone in a brown café  / 129 17. Lush Life jazz café  / 142 18. Hachi Hachi Infinity Café (exterior)  / 148 19. Hachi Hachi Infinity Café (interior)  / 155 20. Rihou gallery café  / 158 21. Prinz gallery café and restaurant  / 163 22. Mo-An café  / 171

vii

Preface

As Japan emerged from postwar reconstruction into the “economic miracle,” I went to Tokyo for the first time. I was very young, I had my first passport, and Japan was my first foreign country. I took my first flight to get there. In the 1960s you might still see dirt roads and radish patches in what are now ultramodern parts of the city. You could still roam backstreets without risk of annihilation by cars or motorcycles, and houses were built low and open—when the amado ­shutter-doors came down in the morning, neighbors could watch over one another easily, children could play, and old people could sit in the sun or mend clothing or shuck beans in the quiet lanes. But traffic and unfamiliar goods and people were beginning to penetrate these premodern villagelike spaces. The Olympic Games of 1964 brought the construction of new subway lines, new public sports pavilions, luxury air-conditioned hotels, and the city began to lose its neighborhood boundedness as unbounded economic energy pulled people into public spaces where they shopped, walked, and consumed. One such space, the coffeehouse, had become popular at least fifty years before but restored its function as a social place after the war in a flurry of new and older forms, antedating the arrival of American café styles by at least four decades. Then as now, my primary place of residence in Japan was a café, a place of respite and refueling and, as we will see, many other functions. Then it might have been the Vienna, a four-story velvet extravaganza, where kaffee Wien was served with Mozart amid gilt chairs and filigreed balconies, or it might have been a neighborhood café, redolent of male friendship, old cigarettes, and smelly feet. But the café memory from  

ix

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that era that still gives me a frisson was the late-night scene at an avantgarde coffeehouse. For a very young person it was exciting enough to be hurtling along in a 1948 Occupation-era Pontiac spewing oily smoke through the dark city streets at screeching speed. But then we arrived at a half-underground cavelike café, and we were asked to remove all of our clothing. The walls were hung with plain white sheets of paper, and customers were asked to strip. Our bodies were swabbed with big, soft, tickly brushes dunked in bright blue paint, and we were encouraged to press ourselves against the sheets. I do not remember how the coffee tasted; I only remember thinking, I’m not in Minnesota. . . . To me, it all seemed darkly glamorous— Tokyo seemed far ahead of the West—or the Midwest—as I knew it. Many years later—in 2007—I found myself in Paris at a retrospective show of the work of the 1940s and 1950s artist Yves Klein, where there was a creaky video of a performance almost exactly like the one I had witnessed in Tokyo, only instead of the random body shapes of Tokyo café-dwellers, the blue-painted bodies were those of elegant Parisian models. With the help of a curator there I found that the event I had witnessed in Tokyo years before was an act of retrospective homage to the much earlier visit of Yves Klein to Tokyo. Thus my adventure in the Japanese café had been avant-garde for me, but it would have been nostalgic arrière-garde for the older and clued-in. Today there are still many novelties to witness from the seat of a Japanese café, but now most are domestic rather than imported. Besides housing the exceptional, they are homes for predictable, ordinary comforts as well. Coffee, and the café itself, have brought a new framing of public and private, new opportunities for experiments in personal identities, and a place where old assignments of value, status, and class may be ignored. As we will see, coffee is the drink of Japanese “modernity” as well as of “democracy,” as both developed over the past 130 years. From my first séancelike session at a dark beatnik-era coffeehouse in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to a seat at another today outdoors in the bright sunshine, life has been coffee-drenched and café-dotted. In those 1960s coffeehouses I tried to fit in as a young girl, dressed “correctly” in a black turtleneck jersey, taking in the cool jazz and the dark coffee, hoping my uncool excitement didn’t show. People around me had their eyes half-closed, drawing on harsh Gauloise cigarettes as they listened with spiritual reverence to recorded music. In Japan, every experience was a novel challenge except for the one place I could recognize—the café. It will be clear that my own experiences color my observation of the  

 

 

 

 

 

Preface  |  xi

cafés described here. Experience filtered through memory over a considerable period of time may form a questionable set of data for the more scientific anthropologist. In part, my descriptions mimic the nostalgia of older café dwellers in Japan who see cafés as places for memory themselves. At first I saw them through the lens of my previous readings on Japan, as textbook examples of fastidious, service-oriented, socially conformist Japanese culture. But very quickly other observations took over, and my realization that I, too, sloppy and unconventional in Japanese terms, was very much at home in them spoke not to their “Western” qualities but to more universal requirements of urban life. The functions of a Japanese café of course related to sociocultural factors and understandings that were particular to Japan, or to Tokyo, or to the neighborhood, or even to the person at the next table. But somehow the differences between this customer’s experience and mine were clarified by the similarities. My experience of cafés long antedated the period of research and preparation devoted to this book. The earlier visits to cafés, during other research sojourns, are recorded more in memory than in deliberate data gathering, and yet they may illustrate features later discovered to be salient in the larger picture of the café. I was not always in a duck blind observing the wildlife, either: my stance was just like that of Japanese visitors to the cafés—there to watch and take note, if not physically take notes, that is, except for the times one seeks not to notice. The anthropologist is an interpreter, a guide, and through her experience takes you farther than the step-back-and-disappear mode taught to us in the past. I am not the first person to note this, nor is it altogether a contemporary view. Anthropologists in the past, like Hortense Powdermaker or Rosalie Wax, investigated their own states of mind and body as they conducted fieldwork—though often these were relegated to texts separate from their ethnographies. How we treat memory and experience in our interpretive frames may differ—my own may appear to romanticize the Japanese café, for example, as it reflects the romance of the café inherent in its branding, marketing, and usage—but we cannot deny their importance. It is easy to find sentimental defenders of such cafés as this book describes. In fact, the author herself might seem to be one of them. Cer­ tainly in terms of time in the seat, I have earned my stripes as a café denizen in Japan. And the uses of observation, experience, and memory are prime tools in the anthropologist’s kit. This is not a memoir, however, but a treatment of the urban phenomena of coffee and the café in Japan with observations drawn from more than forty years there. The  

 

 

 

descriptions, though, should not be taken as nostalgic temps-jadis references—cafés do not need loyal defenders. And there is no deficit in the present to be lamented through references to the past. The remaining “historical” cafés do not represent models for the present, though they may occasionally inspire contemporary ambience. The most salient facts about cafés in Japan are their resilience and shape-shifting, their availability for social connection as well as solitude, and the often desirable absence of form and obligation they offer. The need for such features varies over time and across individuals, even across the hours of a given day. Cafés continue to be active and changing sites of social change and personal taste, locations that may serve both as windows on urban life and as engines driving new cultural phenomena. During dissertation fieldwork in Tokyo and during all of my subsequent stays in Japan, cafés have been where I go to recoup, to write up interviews I’ve just conducted, to wait during the gap between meetings, and to observe what I can of social, personal, and public life. Paying attention to the place and people there over time became an object in itself. Eventually, I knew, I would have to write about them. My deliberate—rather than accidental—fieldwork in Japanese cafés extended to interviews with people in the Japanese (and Japanese Brazilian) coffee industry, with coffee historians, and most with café owners and customers. Between 2002 and 2009 I also gathered industry and café historical data; followed Japanese-style cafés to other parts of Asia, Europe, and America; and interviewed overseas Japanese coffee experts as well. The personal and social uses of the Japanese café are many. How they conjoin with Japanese ideas of service, taste, and space, role and identity, ideas of creativity and expression will underlie the story of coffeehouses and the coffee that is imbibed there. Although I hesitate to declare them unique, the café stories here say something about exceptional aspects of the Japanese coffee place in spaces that are normal and ordinary to most of the contemporary world, each in its own way and according to its social, cultural, and historical setting. So too the café, and coffee, in Japan are local and unremarkable. What brought me to them was the familiar; what kept me in them were the utterly fascinating distinctions.  

 

 

note: In this book Japanese names are presented in the Japanese style, with surname or family name preceding given name. This book will use doubling (uu, oo, etc.) instead of macrons in the transliteration of long vowels.

Chapter 1

Coffee in Public Cafés in Urban Japan

It is 6:30 in the morning on a Tokyo Saturday in a café near a subway entrance in a commercial and entertainment district. The visitor is up early, having flown across too many time zones the day before, and has been out for a walk. People emerging from the subway for a day of work are in the café too, sleepily drinking their first cup of coffee. In the same coffeehouse there are disheveled young people in club gear, blearily having a coffee for the road before they creep down the stairs into the subway to go home. The café is a meeting point between the night people and the day people for this brief moment, a spot in time that illustrates some of the diverse uses of coffee places as staples of urban life in Japan. In the café, among other illuminations of life in the city, you see night move to day. The handover of the city from night people to day people is visible evidence of at least one need for the café. The subway does not run all night, nor do buses, allowing taxis to raise their rates significantly after about 11:00 p.m. Those out for the evening may easily find themselves out for the night. Clubs accommodate by staying open until 5:00 a.m. or later, with often the headliner music group coming onstage after 3:00 in the morning. The dedicated fans stay on too and encounter their opposite numbers—the morning workers—in a gentle culture clash in the early coffeehouses.  

 

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2  |  Coffee in Public

F igu r e 1. Efish café. Photograph by Kondo Minoru.

Life Management in Urban Cafés The coffeehouse helps manage lives: it supports the various schedules of city dwellers, provides respite and social safety in its space, and offers refreshment and the demonstration of taste, in several senses. In its history and in its persistence, the space has shown such uses as the Japanese city welcomes or demands, and has introduced some of its own. The coffeehouse, by its very name, is about coffee, but that is the only universally defining quality—cafés are as diverse as neighborhoods, clienteles, and social changes have made them. In a modernist café on the banks of the Kamo River in Kyoto, two students let their coffee grow cold as they struggle to prepare an assignment. They demonstrate another use of the ubiquitous café in Japan today, and only one experience of the coffee that scents the space. In a mahogany-dark semibasement in Shinbashi, Tokyo, a man in his mid nineties commands silence as a guest lifts a religiously crafted brew made from aged beans, Yemen Mokka harvested in 1992. Opposite a prestigious private women’s university in a posh Tokyo neighborhood, in an ivy-covered coffee shop, two well-bred ladies share alumnae memories over coffee served in translucent German porcelain cups. At an outdoor table of a Starbucks in Kyoto, a young woman sips a decaf caramel macchiato carefully, not to disturb her lipstick as she waits for her  

Coffee in Public  |  3

date, an American student. And three retired construction workers in Nagoya sit at a table in a sepia-toned 1960s café, sharing space as they have shared their long work lives. In cafés there is space where performances of personal and social modernities—in the forms of choice and expression—may be seen. There the lines between “individual” and “community” are drawn lightly, and the freedom to be anonymous can be indulged. The café provides a site for ordinary as well as extraordinary interactions, as it has since its arrival in Japan in the late nineteenth century. Coffee is foreign in origin, but by the early twentieth century it had become culturally naturalized as Japanese and epitomizes the café, as surprising as this may be to those who assume that green tea predominates. The surprises do not end there. Another is that Japan is now the third largest coffee-consuming country in the world, evidence not only of its popularity but also of the structural efficacy of the Japanese coffee industry.1 The linked history and ethnographic complexities of coffee and coffeehouse in Japan treated in this book will provide context and a time line for social and cultural change. From the beginning, the Japanese café was more than a cup of coffee and a coffee maker. It has always been something more than the drink on offer.2 The clubby paneled rooms of the Kahiichakan, Japan’s famous first café, gave way to today’s homey kissaten, but their history is not a straight- line story. Changing tastes and social trends have created branches and offshoots from the root spaces of the café. The places we call cafés persist as their malleable forms continue to reflect the multiple personal, social, and spatial requirements of their times, and do so as thoroughly Japanese spaces but ones with no expectations of thoroughly “Japanese” behavior. Among many reflections they offer is that “Western” and “modern,” concepts conflated in the late nineteenth century, began to diverge as “modern” began to take on a Japanese identity. The café began as Western and modern and became Japanesemodern very quickly. There would be no cafés without coffee and no coffee without the cafés in Japan. The two have inseparably merged together. Coffee now appears elsewhere, of course, in offices and homes and in the ubiquitous vending machines, but the relation between the beverage and the place is foundational: coffee built the café and did not arrive in teahouses. Cafés in Japan have been the locus of community, of continuity in relationships and the creation of new ones.3 They have witnessed innovation, subversion, and transgression in old and new urban cultures,  

 

4  |  Coffee in Public

politics, and individual lives. Cafés are where the foreign and the domestic in art, literature, and ideas have found seats, starting when European influences arrived in Japan in the late nineteenth century. Back to cafés also came expatriate Japanese political activists, artists, writers, and musicians who had sojourned in cosmopolitan Shanghai and European capitals. Soon after their introduction, cafés in Japan became local, and though they hosted foreign ideas and arts, they lost any Western cultural odor they might have had.4 The café is itself fluid and protean and can become what people want and need it to be. It is paradoxically both a space for the performance of cultural givens—service, for example, is as significant, though perhaps not as meticulous, as service in a traditional inn—and it is a place for respite from the demands of cultural performances. It is a place where such givens might be ignored—or contested. It is also the place where, for the price of a cup of coffee, anyone can go. In this study of the Japanese café its functions as an urban public space are central, as is that cup of coffee. Cafés and coffeehouses exist even in the smallest Japanese town, but it is the urban experience that demonstrates the café’s diversity and transformation over time. The cafés here described are various: neither are they all “urban villages” or communities providing society in response to anomic mass culture, nor are they always escapes from the tight constraints of villagelike communities. Rather, cafés are a vital and generative force in the creation and display of new paradigms of civility, aesthetics, and to some degree self-transformation among their clienteles. Since the late nineteenth century, new ideas and new public performances of style and culture have emerged from the café—not always in manifestations welcome to official society. As novel spaces, cafés might breed unorthodox behavior. As one commentator said, if the police records refer frequently to a café, you can be sure something interesting is happening there.5 The drink that characterized these new spaces quickly became a “normal” beverage: like the café itself, coffee subtly lost its foreignness. Providing what one café historian in Japan calls “dry inebriation,” it was also seen as the drink of thoughtfulness, of solace, and it became associated more than any other drink with being “private in public.” 6 Unlike alcoholic drinks in Japan, coffee can accompany a pleasurable solitude. Tea had been a drink for social engagement, and the chaya (teahouse) was a gathering place, usually for people already acquainted with one another. Chaya first appeared as roadside refreshment stands. Cafés were created in Japan about the time that modern transport created nodes and hubs of commerce and entertainment and had similar func 

 

 

 

Coffee in Public  |  5

tions for travelers, but they did not simply take over the functions of the chaya. They introduced coffee as well as novel cultural and social forms and, as Donald Richie notes, represented a “window on the world.” 7 They introduced a place where identities were not confined by older social codes—it has been said that they introduced democracy itself. Some commodities and trends arriving in Japan from Western sources have held on to their foreign identity, their “scent,” even as they became part of ordinary life. The dining room table, the man’s dress suit were “Western” until the postwar years. Coffee, however, became Japanese quickly. Coffee, I suggest, represents Japan’s connection to the outside world in its complexity and contradictions, in its production, importation, and consumption. The coffee industry itself promoted assimilation as first Japanese farmers in Brazil, then entrepreneurs and commercial enterprises brought coffee to urban consumers in a concerted campaign to make it a part of their daily lives. At the end of the nineteenth century Brazilian agricultural policy-makers, developing coffee as a colonial crop with beans brought by the Portuguese, chose Japan as their first targeted overseas market. From the early 1900s coffee, a drink for every day, became a commonplace and Japanese beverage. The expansion of the world’s coffee industries, I will argue, was in its early days closely related to the rise of coffee drinking in Japan. Japanese coffee workers in Brazil, in concert with the aspirations of the Brazilian coffee industries, made Japan a world-beating destination for beans and taste. This book treats the history of coffee in Japan from its earliest days to its contemporary functions: from its use as a medicine among Japanese near foreign settlements and as a stimulant by the seventeenth-century prostitutes of Nagasaki to its ordinary—and extraordinary—consumption today. What sets Japanese coffee apart, at its highest levels, is the high degree of seriousness among specialty coffee importers and processors, surpassing that of most Western counterparts. “Japanese coffee”— meaning the selection, technologies, processes, and especially care taken by the roaster and maker—have begun to travel, along with Japanesestyle cafés now popular in mainland Asia, in Europe, and on the east and west coasts of the United States. Coffee shops in Japan run the gamut from inexpensive chain stores such as Doutor to the height of seriousness in cafés where the ownermaster guides the making of each cup of coffee. Sa-chan, whom we will see in her café in Kyoto, makes every cup of coffee herself, taking the time it takes from choosing the beans and grinding them to the slow pour of a fine stream of hot water over the cloth filter holding the grounds.  

 

 

 

 

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Between these poles there are neighborhood coffee shops where almost everyone knows your name, gallery cafés where the work of local artists is on show, and manga coffee shops where the coffee is secondary to access to comic books. There are outliers too, quirky places such as one where you can sip coffee while your bare feet, submerged in water, are “pedicured” by tiny flesh-eating fish. The first coffeehouse chain in the world, the Paulista group, was created in Tokyo and Osaka in 1907, appealing to young West-leaning customers, with its Brazilian decor and French-style service. Today, however, the Japanese coffee-lover prefers local independent shops to the chain stores, whether Seattle-based or local. As one habitué of independent cafés said, “There is no character in a Tully’s café.” The Japanese café frequenter overseas misses his coffeehouse when he sits in the disorienting anonymity of a chain shop in Chicago or Rome and wonders where he is. Local spaces now attract younger customers who might have sought out Seattle stores in the recent past. By 2003, the decline of such shops reflected a change in consumer choices, away from slick and repetitious locales toward places where the owner may express his own sensibility. Seiichiro Samejima, a consumption analyst in Tokyo, said, “The Star­ bucks boom is over in Japan,” noting that Starbucks was then cutting its new store openings by one-third.8 Young women now find one-off smart or cozy cafés in fashion and style magazines that offer a curriculum in street cool; young men might follow the women or, from word of mouth or a hobbyist inclination, seek out places that might enhance or reflect their own identity. One man in his late twenties said that as a student he had one café for study and another for dating; now he has fifteen or twenty—for various things, including several, he says, for the taste of their coffee, which had not interested him when he was younger. And rising numbers of older people find regular seats in niches of their own—seldom in the anonymity of the chain stores but in independent cafés, determined by taste, social needs, and their budget. As urban and social changes have broken through the polite fiction of Japan as a homogeneous, harmonious, and consensus-driven society, the importance of the café in allowing or filling gaps—social, temporal, institutional, and personal—increases.9 The elderly, now forming just under one-quarter of the population, enjoyed coffee as a small indulgence when they were young in postwar reconstruction and now reside in cafés where their coevals congregate. The furiitaa, part-time, freelance young workers, rely on cafés as workspaces and offices very dif 

 

 

 

Coffee in Public  |  7

ferent from those of their salaryman fathers. The unemployed can spend hours there, sometimes filling out job applications and sometimes simply sitting. The café is, as we shall see, a safe place to be private in public when privacy itself can be socially problematic and when there are few times and spaces for being alone. And of course men and women can meet in public spaces like these with impunity—flaunting social mores safely—as they have since the time of the first cafés of the early 1900s. Cafés are educational spaces where innovations in technology, body, and mind are displayed. The Japanese version of the flapper, the moga (modern girl), in the late 1910s and early 1920s was a fashion plate educating the café public in her novel style of clothing—and leg-crossing. More recent objects for learning might include the latest recorded music, organic foods, or works of art. The uses of social media are not immediately obvious in Japanese cafés, but that is because they are usually miniaturized. One rarely sees laptops in independent cafés, and wi-fi spaces are limited, but there are many people with smartphones, MP3s, and iPods, making the “community” extend beyond the walls of the café. There may be music, but it will rarely blare: most café dwellers seem to prefer quiet. This book’s treatment of coffee and the café in Japan will engage four approaches: the social history of cafés; the ethnographic treatment of cafés as urban spaces; the development of coffee as a commercial industry; and the culture of coffee itself, including coffee as object of work, connoisseurship, and artisanal practice. Together these four approaches trace a narrative line, beginning with the first tastings of coffee brought by missionaries and traders in the sixteenth century, and the first coffeehouse’s appearance in the 1880s. The stories are intensely personal, the author’s own and those of her respondents and colleagues, but the story has global reach and scholarly import, as it merges experience, observation, memory, and historical data. The story of the first coffeehouse in Japan illuminates the later paths coffee and the café have taken in Japan. In every era since, coffeehouses have reflected the concerns and needs of urban life, just as this one did in the Meiji era.  

 

 

The First Japanese Coffeehouse: Tei Ei-kei and the Kahiichakan A brick monument surmounted by a large white coffee cup sits in a small garden to the right side of the Tokyo head office of the Sanyo Electric Company in Ueno. This monument was erected April 13, 2008, exactly

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F igu r e 2. Monument to Tei Ei-kei at the former site of his Kachiichakan coffeehouse in Tokyo. Photograph by the author.

120 years after the founding of Japan’s first coffeehouse of record in 1888. Tei Ei-kei, known in Japanese as Nishimura Tsurukichi, was the creator and “master” of the Kahiichakan (sometimes transliterated as Kahiisakan), which has acquired an almost legendary status as the first café in Japan.10 Coffee itself had arrived in Japan much earlier, but the story of Tei Ei-kei’s bastion of taste and culture established the association of coffee with a particular kind of modern urban style and place. This monument demonstrates the power of coffee in Japan today more than it does the eminence, or success, of the original coffeehouse. Tei Ei-kei’s story has taken on a hagiographic quality: he has become

Coffee in Public  |  9

iconic as the “first coffeehouse master” of Japan. His travails and failures cast him and coffee itself in a minor key, a melancholic frame (a mood lens commonly seen as desirable in café history). Tei Ei-kei was born in 1859 in Nagasaki to a man known as Tomosuke, but the man who adopted and named him was Tei Ei-nei (the foster son of Tomosuke, a complicated relationship indeed), a Taiwanese secretary in Japan’s Foreign Ministry, who spoke Chinese, Japanese, and English. Tei Ei-kei learned Chinese in Beijing as a child in 1865 and French in Kyoto in 1872, and he studied English as well from his early childhood. He spoke and read four languages by the age of fourteen. His father, hoping to improve his chances for success, which might have been limited by his actual and adoptive ancestry, sent him at the age of sixteen to Yale University in America. In principle this was a wise move during the period of rapid change, when “modern” and “Western” were nearly synonymous and definitely desirable. Unfortunately for the security of his future but fortunately for Japanese coffee history, he was either sickly (in some accounts kidney disease is mentioned) or party-loving (trips to New York City coffeehouses for entertainment are noted in his biography) and had to leave Yale in 1879 without finishing his studies. During his time in America, Tei Ei-kei had developed a taste for coffee, and on a slow trip home through Europe he visited London’s popular coffeehouses, such as Langbourne Coffee-House on Fenchurch Street and Café Royal in Piccadilly. At this time in London tea was overtaking coffee as a “national” drink, as the tea trade in Britain’s colonies promoted home consumption of this import over coffee. Here was a paradoxical case of cultural exchange taking place, thanks to the accidents of colonialism and its scrambling of experience and commodities: Tei Ei-kei had picked up the taste for coffee in America, where people had forsworn the tea of their former overlords, and picked up the love of coffee environments in England, where the population had all but forsworn coffee. After Tei Ei-kei returned to Japan he spent a few years teaching— apparently he was a talented teacher—at what is now Okayama Uni­ ver­sity, but then went to work in the Ministry of Finance in Tokyo. In 1883 he married Suga Toshiko, who died of tuberculosis three years later, leaving Tei Ei-kei with a son. After this tragedy, he faced more bad luck: he lost his job and later his house was consumed by fire, in 1887. After marrying his wife’s sister, Tokuko, he built a two-story Westernstyle house and in 1888, at the age of thirty, opened the Kahiichakan. Remembering the style and services of clublike coffeehouses in England, Tei Ei-kei created a place of masculine amenities.  

 

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At the time, all things “Western” had great cachet. The Rokumeikan (Deer Cry Pavilion) was an elite establishment where Western manners and fashions were showcased. This building, designed by Josiah Conder and finished in 1883, housed elaborate balls and entertainments and became a stage for the performance of manners, clothing—top hats, tails, and ball gowns—and other aspects of elite Western society. This was the era of bunmei kaika (civilization and enlightenment) in Japan, when both meant “Western.” Tei Ei-kei, according to his friend Terashita Tat­ suo, decided to “do something for the younger generation by opening a coffeehouse, which would be a space to share knowledge, a social salon where ordinary people, students, and youths could gather . . . not like the Rokumeikan where Western things are only superficial.” 11 He wanted more than a waltz as evidence of cultural integration. His vision came from empathy with the indulged customer rather than from the strategies of a canny businessman; the practicalities of management eluded him. He saw himself in the seats of his café, and dreamed of an attractive superfluity of amenities: he provided newspapers, comfortable leather chairs, billiard tables, writing desks and supplies, baths, and nap rooms—all for the nominal price of one cup of coffee, 1 sen 5 ri, or coffee with milk, 2 sen. Modern (Western) smoking paraphernalia were also provided, and it was here that tobacco and coffee first found their public affinity for each other, as tobacco (originally brought to Japan by Portuguese in 1601 in the form of cigars) was also associated with this male social space. A man could stay all day writing letters, chatting, napping, or conducting business. The place was very popular among aspiring cosmopolitans from merchant-class backgrounds as well as among younger samurai who could join them now, no longer constrained or privileged by the class restrictions of the Tokugawa period. Amenity-rich and cash-poor, the Kahiichakan went bankrupt in 1893, only five years after its founding. His second wife, like her sister, had died of tuberculosis in 1890, and, depressed and underoccupied, Tei Ei-kei dabbled in speculation— at which he apparently was no better than at café management—and, deep in debt, he tried to kill himself. A friend found his suicide note, stopped him in time, and, obtaining papers for him, found passage for him to America under the name of Nishimura Tsurukichi, to start a new life in Seattle. Attempting to run a small shop there (said to have sold dry goods and coffee), but sinking to dishwasher status, he died there at thirty-six years of age on July 17, 1895. His grave in Lakeview Cemetery, inscribed with his Japanese name of T. Nishimura, is now vis 

 

 

 

 

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ited by Japanese coffee aficionados and Japanese coffee industry leaders. The hindsight ironies of a Chinese gentleman establishing the first popular coffeehouse in Japan, drawn from a model learned in London, failing from its success, and then ending his days in the future corporate capital of specialty coffee in America, are many. That he learned coffee in America, its spaces in tea-drinking England, and helped to make it the most popular social beverage in tea-identified Japan is only one of these. On the Tokyo monument where the Kahiichakan once stood is a portrait of a pleasant, mustachioed but weak-featured young man, whose dream, in spite of his personal failures, became a success. He saw what modern people needed and gave it to them, but without having the skills of modern business himself, he could not sustain it.

New Cafés for New Urbanites Cafés in the late Meiji (1868–1912) and early Taisho (1912–1926) peri­ ods responded to needs for public personal space. While some were showpieces of modernity and demonstrations of the Western world, such as the café at the Third National Exposition for the Encouragement of Industry in 1890, most cafés had more everyday uses. Work and family life were changing, diverging in their functions, opportunities, and ­social and psychological influences. Work for men in families not engaged in agriculture or a family enterprise separated them from the house and its routines and expectations. In factory or office the employee was expected to commit himself to the place and schedule of the workplace. At home such men might be tended by their families and be isolated from them as their identity as worker outside the house often took precedence over their identity as father or household head. As for the British factory worker or the French bureaucrat, for the Japanese worker, home might be refuge but the café (or pub) was restoration. The uses of city spaces were changing as well, as people from rural or provincial areas of Japan arrived for work, settled, created, and were served by areas of commerce and lines of transportation. As public spaces, cafés catered to people of different origins and interests. By the early 1900s, following on the Edo-period entertainment districts (sakariba) where the wonders of the city were on display, there were coffeehouses where newly arrived rural migrants went to hear their own provincial dialects and learn the ropes of city life. Sakariba, the “animated spaces” where a new urban vernacular was created, had proliferated in larger cities well before modernization. These  

 

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included small public spaces carved out of corners where several lanes intersected—an open space where yatai (tent-shacks where simple foods like noodles were made and sold) were set up at night or small stalls where you could have services performed such as shoe repair while you ate and drank. A sakariba could also be an area where the small roads between bars, restaurants, and cafés acted as gathering spaces for those who frequented the entertainments or just imbibed their atmosphere. Sakariba held out the allure of “slumming” to middle- and upper-class urbanites as they began or ended a glamorous evening with a drink on stools at a yakitoriya under the tracks, or found casual entertainment (buskers) or sex (tiny brothels) in the downscale leisure zones. These pocket spaces seemingly appeared and disappeared overnight, persisting especially in times when such informal arrangements were needed, such as the immediate postwar era of black-market goods and during the influx of new migrant labor in the 1980s and 1990s. The café is a shape-shifter. Its persistence is due to its malleability. What has been called the “third space,” not-home, not-work, has changed to conform to changes in the other two spaces, as work has become portable, household chores less demanding, and people more mobile.12 The fluidity of a café contrasts markedly with the fixed and more specific functions of a bathhouse, a classroom, an office, or a temple. The status of a person’s place in a coffeehouse is not at risk; to maintain it does not usually require regular visits, a personal relationship with the staff or with a coterie of fellow customers. Cafés are, as Foucault notes, “heterotopic” locations whose many uses and functions reveal changes in economic conditions, social forms, and aesthetic experience.13 These spaces might serve as seats for transient flaneurs, or anomic places contrasting with the overdetermined, hypernomic social frame in which most Japanese urban people live. The world of the café in Japan has thus included both continuity and novelty in its attractions. The constant factor is the coffee-­designated space for respite, stimulation, or possibly interactions different from those of ordinary life; the novelty lies in the trends and functions the café has responded to, amplified, or introduced. In postwar Japan, for example, “democratization”—or the discussion of what that could possibly mean—found a stage in the cafés near Nagata-cho in Tokyo, where the ordinary politics of backstage deal-making moved. From the late 1960s into the 1970s, experiments in all directions—from the artistic avant-garde (such as the blue paint event described earlier) to back-tothe-earth greens, anti–Security Treaty demonstrators, experimental musi 

 

 

 

 

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cians, radical feminism, and the sexual revolution—were witnessed in cafés. In the cafés surrounding Tokyo University during the late 1960s, student activists would repair to regroup and tend to the effects of tear gas during encounters with the police. Cafés there now host nostalgic reunions of the veterans of the movement. Cafés are not necessarily locations of social or cultural resistance. In fact, the ordinary kissaten might support rather than subvert the status quo by providing a low-key zone for restoration where a person can regain the energy to return to work in the “establishment.” The stress released by a personal or social time-out in a café might otherwise result in poor productivity or in active subversion of oppressive work conditions; the café might be said to allow the sometimes deadening or exploitative work of one’s official life to continue. One reported use of the café speaks to a kind of work management employers do not favor: contrary to the notion of workaholism in Japan, some salaried workers whose overtime pay rate is attractive might spend hours of daytime doing very little at a café away from the office, only to return just before quitting time to “start” work at a higher rate of pay. The functions served by the Japanese café are seen elsewhere, but the move from social to personal uses has a long history.  

Public Drinking in Japan: From Chaya to Koohii Hausu The European coffeehouse, seditious or comforting, was a place of multiple functions and changeable moods. It had its precursors in taverns, but the Japanese koohii hausu was more closely related to the teahouses built alongside the roads where travelers could be refreshed—at first, by just water and a rest space, but as tea became more generally available, identified by that beverage. From the middle of the Edo period, teahouses, ninai chaya, were rest stops in the precinct of a shrine or in front of a temple. Different types of chaya appeared, such as koshikake chaya (wayside respite huts), which served tea and dango (sweet dumplings). As Donald Shively describes the more elegant seventeenth-century chaya, they were “tasteful parlors for drinking and dining, where dancing girls and other entertainers could be summoned.” 14 Iro chaya might also offer sexual play with waitresses—these establishments belonged to the class of services called “water trades,” mizushobai, associated with entertainment, especially with sex. Tebiki chaya (introduction teahouses) were available in the red-light districts, and shibai chaya (theater tea  

 

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stalls) provided food and drink to spectators of public events. The only chaya remaining today whose traditions come from this period are the sumo chaya, the service places where sumo wrestling tickets and refreshments and omiyage (souvenirs) are provided by the Nihon Sumo Kyokai (Japan Sumo Association). They are based in local community networks, offer services to regular fans, and echo in their assumptions of community the older mizushobai trades. They reflect the conventions of the sakariba, the older neighborhood social and entertainment spaces. Such sakariba housed small neighborhood theaters, the taishu engeki (People’s Theaters), which offered vaudeville-style shows, low humor, and convivial crowds—at low ticket prices. There were also noodle stands, sake shops, and small restaurants, and sometimes street buskers. Sakariba were not “trendy” spaces; they were rather conservative—a new style of show, though it might attract customers, would be viewed skeptically by local denizens. Chaya and, later, milk halls, where milk flavored with coffee was served, were treats for ordinary people—and for students for whom this kind of slumming was both entertaining and affordable. Chaya of the roadside variety gradually became fixed urban sites of recreation. Almost exclusively male in clientele, chaya were places where one was known, not anonymous, and where one went to share space, tea, and talk. Like the Turkish kahvehane, these were sites for close relationships between host and guests, in which the host took responsibility for the welfare of the guest, noted absences, and nurtured connections. Chaya were places where bonds or alliances between families were attended to, where neighborhood information—or gossip— was exchanged, where breaches were created or healed. These basically homogeneous sites offered the play of distinctions within a narrow range. Teahouse nicknames sometimes replaced family names. Based on personal attributes such as facial features (Big Nose) or speech idiosyncrasies (Bumpkin Mouth), these nicknames became playful signs of membership in the chaya, where the boundaries of polite behavior could be stretched—and where what was said might be left there or at least not “count.” The bars of contemporary Japan now provide this fictive freedom, in which the white-collar worker can engage colleagues and superiors with impunity—for the most part. Coffeehouses, where alcohol is rarely served, do not offer this service. Why chaya gave way to coffeehouses, instead of the two becoming noncompeting niche-filling institutions, is a story of urban change and modernization as well as a story of beverages. By the middle of the nine 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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teenth century the merchant class, at the bottom of the status ladder of fixed classes, had gained cultural and economic power incommensurate with its official low rank. The presence of merchants as consumers drove the refreshment and entertainment services, and gradually the production of artistic goods as well. Attempts to control merchants since the seventeenth century had included sumptuary laws forbidding the display of economic resources, restricting for example the eating of certain foods and the wearing of silk in public to samurai and to the aristocracy.15 These were last-ditch measures to protect the status system; by the early nineteenth century, that system was increasingly out of tune with social and economic realities. Eventually, such restrictions could not hold, and by the beginning of the Meiji era they had become anachronistic, as merchants, freed from the rigidities of the class system, began to display and, more significantly, to use their economic power. They were the leading force in creating an urban culture, the chonin culture of the old capital, Kyoto, and the expansive city lifestyle and tastes of Edo merchants. Elite experiences of urban culture became narrower as taste became the precinct of a larger, less exclusive population.16 These merchants had engaged openly in the worlds of entertainment and indulgence, and unlike the samurai, who had to visit mizushobai establishments in mufti, the merchants “owned” the spaces publicly. The rising middle class, with enhanced financial power, could indulge itself in new arenas of consumption. The teahouses of the city, much like the kahvehane in modernizing Turkey, seemed old and conservative, the haunts of earlier generations of men. The “new men” were looking for public spaces in which to display themselves and communicate new things. And soon, “new women” would join them. The coffeehouse and a new beverage to consume there were just around the corner. By the end of the nineteenth century, coffee would begin to eclipse tea in modern public spaces, and its novelty became part of the urban landscape. The first Japanese coffeehouse—the Kahiichakan—appeared at a time of rapid political, social, and urban change. Edo had become Tokyo (the Eastern Capital), and the concentration of state symbol (in the person of the emperor) and of state power (in bureaucracy, army, and other institutions) in one place was a powerful stabilizer: Tokyo’s centrality, both political and economic, became a given from the late nineteenth century on, as other areas were seen as the chihoo—the outlying regions. Before the Meiji era, Nagasaki and other ports of entry and trade were the places where foreign influences arrived first; but after the 1870s Tokyo’s  

 

 

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role in “globalizing” Japan increased as it drew more goods and ideas from the West. For urbanites, cafés of various types provided education in the new. “New” meant foods from the West, the use of tables and chairs, and a system of table service by waiters and waitresses. In some older coffeehouses, one bought a coupon for a coffee at a desk near the door and handed it to the barman. The place itself had no older tradition of social etiquette; free from the constraints of older patterns, visitors might explore newer fashions of behavior. Decommissioned samurai might mingle with formerly low-status merchants, and both would be equally engaged in the novel scene, and newly rich merchants and very poor former samurai might experience novel status incongruities in the café. Industrialization in the late nineteenth century brought large numbers to Tokyo, who found industrial work through family connections or through recruiters. As Ezra Vogel has noted, kin-linked migration in Japanese industrialization was aided by the “stem family” structure, in which inheritance and responsibility for the continuation of the family went to one child only. Primogeniture in Japanese practice offered younger sons supported relocation to start branch families and to find work.17 Young women, brought for short periods to factories as deka­ segi rodo (work away from home), were restricted to dormitories, not to be “urbanized” as ideally they were to be returned unchanged to their parents, ready for marriage in the countryside. The laborers who sought comfort in cafés in this era were usually men. The coffeehouses at the turn of the twentieth century served workers as windows to the urban scene. Coffee came—in the 1860s—to the countryside in the form of a koohiito, a sugar ball mixed with coffee to be melted into hot water, but coffee places were novel to the rural migrant. The older chaya still served them as well, but now as urban rather than rural wayside stations. The ordinary newcomer was at first ill at ease in the city, and cafés or chaya were zones of comfort. There were no cafés in the rural areas. As one new to the city said, “it wasn’t because of the coffee itself. It was because the kissaten was a clue (tegakari) to understand quickly the big city.” 18 Some kissaten became destinations for people from particular regions—arrivals from Toohoku, for example, went to specific cafés where earlier migrants from the northeast gathered, and through these networks found information for survival and success in the city. The Kahiichakan of the 1880s helped to establish a new style of public place in Japan. It bore no resemblance to the chaya, and was instead  

 

 

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a deliberate evocation of the new and the foreign. In the style of service, the beverage on offer, and most particularly in the diversity of its customers, the new coffeehouses were strikingly different from their teahouse precedents. The chaya as “village” where everyone knows your name gave way to the malleable space where you might define yourself in ways not known in your “village” and, at the same time, the space itself was constantly mutable. What was soon to follow, the trendy coffee bars and cabaret-type “passion palaces,” would tell of modernity and its redefinitions of public space, and the new people, above all women, who would create their own meanings in a space of relative equality. Coffee in Japan in fact harks back to Portuguese and Dutch trade in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to empire, missionaries, and colonial exchanges in the late 1800s, and, in the early twentieth century, to Western city life and urbanity. Coffee and its drinking are mobile phenomena: where it is grown is not where it is chiefly consumed, and its profile reflects third-world production and first-world drinking. The only producing country that is also a high-consuming country is Brazil. Coffee beans are moved, traded, and used in creating economic relationships and market flows. The roots of the urban café in Japan were watered by the rich café-scapes of imperial Hapsburg Vienna, cafés on Haussmann’s grand boulevards in Paris, and the haunts of London’s notquite-clubbable eighteenth-century merchant class. In the early twentieth century Japan’s coffee and cafés became Japanese, even as they were reminiscent of the Viennese grande époque, as in the red velvet seats of the Café Tsukiji in Kyoto. The coffee itself was not filtered through Europe as a secondary export: the establishment of a Brazil-to-Japan direct trade, the creation of a population of coffee aficionados, and the predictable and surprising localisms of the Japanese café were not simple derivations from abroad. Always changing to suit new tastes, social and economic conditions, and new people, the café has remained a constant in people’s lives. Its adaptability is both the product of and reason for its persistence. Given all these transformations and influences over time, there is no one “Japanese café.” Reduced to an essence, it might be a place where the space matters, the coffee counts, where for a time recreation and respite replace responsibility and repetition in ordinary life, or where that which cannot find an institutional “home” can find performance space. Or it may be, as one Japanese businessman said, a place where you go to do nothing—as he said, “Isn’t that a good place?” Cafés have demonstrated the mutability of Japanese culture and the  

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rigidities of cultural manifestations in institutional contexts. The café sits between the institutions that guide an urban person’s life, and as a place apart has both the freedom to change and the power to fill the gaps in people’s lives. This freedom and this function are what keep cafés important in the daily experiences of most people. In conditions of constant social change, and most strikingly in times of economic and historical upheavals, people have found uses for cafés that underline the changes as well as accommodating them. The man who needs a place to sit to deal with his shame at being unemployed, the woman whose freelance work has no office, the student who cannot study in her crowded and noisy home are drawn to the coffeehouse. The café allows for social and personal uses, for meetings as well as for solitude. The multiplicity of functions served by the café demonstrates the plurality of situations and experiences and offers a definition of modern Japan itself, a place where the demands on people’s energies and commitments are strong but where expression of the self continues also to demand outlets. In addition, the café is where spontaneous, untied events can happen, as well as programs of creative and artistic activities. The history of sociality and modernity in men’s and women’s lives can be tracked in the café, from the chaya of the water trades to the cabarets of the late 1920s, to the only-in-Japan capsule cyber-cafés. The public and private functions of the coffeehouse in Japan are full of the stories of change; the persistence of the café is due to its ability to move with its times and to its premise: it is a place where history is viewed but is not static.

Chapter 2

Japan’s Cafés Coffee and the Counterintuitive

Countering Perceptions: Coffee as King in Japan Japanese cafés offer correctives to received knowledge of the directions of modernity and globalization. What we learn in Japan about the uses of the café may be both similar to and at odds with our understandings of café society and globalization elsewhere, and what we imagine of Japan’s public society and beverage consumption may prove to be different from our suppositions. There are four basic surprises in the stories. To begin with, the fact that Japan is a coffee-drinking society comes as a surprise to those who think tea is the predominant beverage. That Japan is now the third largest coffee importing country in the world might also shock. Next, learning that Japan was targeted in the late nineteenth century as the country that would jump-start the coffee industry of Brazil, today’s largest producer of coffee beans, surprises the observer who might think that Japan’s coffee boom piggybacked on that of the West. And finally, more recent newcomers to Japan might be surprised to learn that cafés in Japan were thriving long before the Seattle-driven coffee boom. In the late nineteenth century, cafés were already significant spaces in Japanese society, creating and promoting novelty, community, and a modern sort of public privacy. It is these surprises that transformed this work, which began as a social history of the Japanese café and became a treatment of urban public space and the 19

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F igu r e 3. Shinshindo in Kyoto. Photograph by Kondo Minoru.

development of coffee itself: it became a study of what makes the ordinary extraordinary in contemporary Japanese culture. Coffee and cafés demonstrate patterns of change in Japanese urban history and illuminate the role of Japan as an early agent of globalization for a world commodity now trading second only to oil. Japanese agents were early on the scene in Brazil, and soon expanded exports from there and other coffee-rich countries of origin. And Japanese cafés began quickly to diverge from the styles they first adopted from the West, adapting them to Japanese tastes and practices and developing the highest standards for coffee anywhere in the world. We in America can now drink coffee Japanese style, rather than imagining that they are drinking “our” coffee. The ways in which Japanese people drink coffee and where they drink it are distinctive features of Japanese urban life. Japanese cities are densely populated, full of destination, duty, and distraction. The café offers society in place of isolation, or isolation when society is too demanding. The café in Japan does not represent an antidote to the social ills of the modern city—it is not the corrective to anonymity, as some have termed the café in America.1 In fact, a shift from social public space to private-in-public space as the significant use of the café seems to represent the opposite. In Japan, at any rate, being alone is what is a premium good, not being together.  

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There are reasons why most cafés in Japan are not laptop-friendly, reasons why Americans must seek long and hard for decaffeinated coffee in Japan, reasons why a coffee master in Japan will resist using an espresso machine, preferring to hand-drip one cup at a time. Among many other localisms of café cultures, these can be explained not as exotic or traditional Japanese traits, but as habits that have been shaped by a developing culture of coffee and by constantly changing social and economic conditions. Cultural change does not mean the obliteration of older cultural forms and their replacement with new cultural priorities. Japanese culture itself is inscribed with change, and not only in a struggle to preserve itself. Coffee and the café were little known in Japan in the late nineteenth century, but they were seamlessly adopted and became themselves culture generators and by doing so were saved from the transience of a fad. Jakob Norberg notes that it is the inchoate ambiguity of the café’s form that accounts for its persistence.2 While displaying and creating novelties, cafés can also employ their ambiguous “culture” in accommodating the changing needs and desires of urbanites. Japanese tea has a famously ritualized culture. Tea and its ways do not, however, provide the template for Japanese coffee drinking. The “way of coffee” itself may appear to us similar to the meticulous care given to powdered tea (matcha) in the tea ceremony, but it is a culture all its own, driven by supraordinate cultures of performance and behavior, ways of thinking and doing in work, as often novel as traditional.

Coffee Locations Since its first appearance as a “public” beverage, coffee has been a facilitator of social interactions. By the early 1500s in the Middle East, coffee drinking had become a public pastime.3 Coffee and companionship defined the coffee stand as a public space. The Arab coffeehouse—usually a tented stall surrounded by stools for sitting in a market area—had been a social institution since about the year 1000 when traders came back from Abyssinia bringing the beans, which they boiled into a drink called quahwa—“that which prevents sleep.” In Constantinople in 1475 the first Turkish kahvehane (sometimes rendered as kiva han) or coffeehouse was created. In Turkey cafés at first were conservative and primarily masculine locations. Early coffeehouses were places where one’s social position might be created, recognized, or reinforced. The Constantinople coffeehouse was a place for powerful elders, where younger men might be  

 

 

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granted patronage and learn the political strategies of their mentors. But its “open door” might also allow in those who would subvert that power, and cafés were sometimes closed down by officials who feared sedition—or any political or religious debate. Indeed, cafés witnessed assassinations. While other more “accidental” gathering places, such as public baths or market squares, were sources of information or gossip, attendance at a coffee establishment became all but required for business or civic participation. Village or neighborhood leaders could be so predictably found there that the kahvehane was like a little “city hall” where they regularly received petitioners. By the end of the Ottoman Empire, during a period of modernization, the older kahvehane began to seem old-fashioned, “stagnant, sullied places” where the older men played cards, while European-style cafés attracted those seeking the cachet of modernity.4 The older kahvehane became passively rather than actively political as politicians used them as bases for recruitment rather than places where their power was generated or consolidated; the new cafés bred new thoughts—and new kinds of coffee, as Turkish coffee gave way there to European brews, drips, siphons, and later espresso. Older locations for coffee-drinking persisted, such as the hamam (the bathhouse) and the garden parties of wealthy, traditional families. The new coffeehouse implied freedom from at least some social conventions. Less hierarchical than the kahvehane, it was a secular place, different from the mosque, with options for diversion and a place for offering and receiving hospitality. With Arab traders, coffee came to Venice, its first port of call in Europe. The earliest coffee shops in Europe appeared there in 1615 and later in Vienna, where coffee was carried by Turkish troops attempting to take the city in 1683. An officer, Franz George Kolshitsky, experienced in “the East,” was sent to penetrate Turkish lines to summon Polish troops on the other side. Left behind as the Turks fled were camels and stores of honey and coffee beans, which the Viennese at first took for camel fodder. Kolshitsky, knowing the value of coffee, bought up all the beans and started Vienna’s first coffeehouse, the Blue Bottle, on the Domgasse immediately after the defeat in 1683.5 Before this, coffee had spread north to Paris and then to England— in 1645, the first Parisian café serving coffee was established. Nathaniel Canopius, a Cretan student at Oxford, is said to have drunk the first cup of coffee in England in his rooms, and in 1650, Jacob, a Jew from Tur­key, established a coffee room there, frequented by students from Oxford’s Balliol College. A native of Smyrna, Pasqua Rosee, was licensed to open  

 

 

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the first London coffeehouse (now the Jamaica Inn) in St. Michael’s Alley, Cornhill, not far from St. Paul’s in the City. The popularity of these (at that time still very male) places in England was due not only to the coffee, a novelty at the time, but to the free mingling of people in a social space not defined by any determinant of class or rank—the ability to pay for the coffee was the equalizer. In addition, the availability of news made the coffeehouse quickly indispensable to men of business, trade, and banking. Samuel Pepys (1633– 1703) reported in his diary every visit he made to a coffeehouse, who was there, and discussing what. He went three or four times per week for what he called the “sociality” of the places. In some cafés the daily newspapers were read aloud—in part to include everyone, especially those whose reading skills might not be acute, in the heated discussions of the day. You mingled with people you would not otherwise meet in the work of your day, and these accidents of meeting were valuable to Pepys; he learned something new with every visit.6 The coffeehouse became known as the “penny university,” where access to important knowledge could be had for the one-penny price of a cup of coffee. Not always a boon for those in power, the freedom of the coffeehouse for people of all ranks and interests and its ability to organize news and opinion became suspect. Charles II shut down the coffeehouses on December 23, 1675, but even the king had to yield to the importance of these “dangerous” places in the economy of England and sixteen days later, on January 8, they were reopened.7 Charles II’s attempt to suppress the café was echoed a century later in Prussia when Frederick the Great forbade coffee except in licensed establishments. He saw it (and the places where it was consumed) as the engine driving anti­governmental activism and sent out Kaffee Schnufflers, men trained to sniff out coffee in illegal “speakeasies.” 8 Other suspicions and aversions were associated with coffee. In seven­ teenth-century England a broadside was published, said to be written by women but most probably written by men in what was apparently a satirical protest against the brew: women were said to claim that their men under the influence of coffee lost ambition and, worse, their sexual potency. Other complaints or suspicions had to do with coffee’s exotic origins—it was Levantine, associated with Turks, Arabs, and Jews, and its alien nature seemed to make it an “oriental” beverage—attractive to some, but dangerous to many. Later, its foreign origin helped to label it progressive and “modern.” 9 A new beverage and its haunts might indeed need watching. And yet by 1700 coffeehouses were entrenched  

 

 

 

 

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in England: there were three thousand in London, while Paris had only six hundred.10 The coffeehouse of the English seventeenth century was vital as a source of shipping news, as runners would post cargo ship arrivals (and notices of ships lost at sea) for importers and insurers. Lloyd’s, the famous insurance underwriters, was first a coffeehouse established on Tower Street near the docks in 1687. The second half of the seventeenth century was the era of colonial trade, with Dutch and English vying for supremacy in moving goods from their colonies. Knowledge of the sea routes, of types of goods, and volumes of goods on their journeys was very important for traders, and Lloyd’s provided coffee and information for the men whose livelihoods depended on trade. The owner posted “Lloyd’s List” on the wall, with gleanings from visiting sea captains (who had their own corner in the coffeehouse). He also provided writing equipment for deals made at his tables. Before mass publication of newspapers, places like Lloyd’s facilitated transactions. The regulars here created in 1691 the Society of Lloyd’s, insurance underwriters for colonial missions and for trade within Europe, which in turn became Lloyd’s of London. This company has twice relocated since the seventeenth century but still retains the name of “waiter” for its porters in commemoration of its coffeehouse roots. As Jürgen Habermas notes, the English coffeehouse of this era offered a unique service—that of open communication.11 In Japan, too, the advancement of commerce and communication in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was promoted in the coffeehouse, but as technologies of printing and transportation improved and replaced this function, coffeehouses did not disappear; instead, they served other needs—or created them. Coffeehouses, by then a mainstay of urban culture in Europe, America, and Japan, simply adjusted to new conditions. They became, with other changes in society and city life, locations where the modern could be observed and created. Adjustability to different urban cultures was relatively simple. In Paris, the street vendor was a common sight and new products were frequently introduced by a transient food peddler. The first coffee purveyor of record in Paris was an Armenian door-to-door salesman named Pascal, who carried a kit with utensils for grinding and boiling the beans for cup service made to order. And while the English coffeehouse became a location important to trade and money, the French versions, such as Le Procope (founded by an Italian, Francisco Procopio dei Celtelli, in 1689) and others, were locations of “culture” as well as commerce. Paris  

 

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cafés were social and fashionable venues but also had political resonance. The Café Foy was a home for revolutionaries, and by the late eighteenth century cafés were under surveillance, first by the royalists and then by those worried about counterrevolutionaries. Cafés in France were taken very seriously as leaders for a new era and shapers of new citizens. Summing up the importance of the café, Michelet, the chronicler of urban life, noted that coffee was “the great event which created new customs and even modified the human temperament.” 12 From an open arena to a site for vital mercantile information to the “penny university,” the café came to represent civility itself. In America coffee came to represent revolution. In the late eighteenth century after the Boston Tea Party, tea was no longer a politically correct beverage and coffeehouses became popular. The British had earlier begun to turn to tea, especially from British-owned colonial tea plantations in India and China. Coffee was thus a revolutionary choice in America, as tea resonated with England’s colonial geography. The intertwined histories of urban culture and the café in Europe and America are stories of change and of freedom in the space of liberality and bourgeois innovation. In Japan too, the arrival of the café, as we have seen, heralded more than options for personal choices.

Cafés in Social Change The story of the uses of cafés in people’s lives, as we will see, is a story of social change: for example, in the period of “modernization,” as families came to depend on the income of a salaried worker rather than on the production of the family as an enterprise, the home became a space apart, and the café came to fill a gap between home and work. This function is often called that of the “third space.” The café, as we will see, is a “third space” that offers what neither of the others offer, a place where the responsibilities of those primary locations have no weight and a place where the definitions of the individual are concomitantly lighter and more fluid. In workplaces strong pressure for performance and loyalty is brought to bear on individuals whose identity is wrapped up tightly in the organization. Home was a place of serious endeavor as well, as middle-class families struggled to place their young in paths leading to future middle-class success. The café can also be seen as an alternative community, not replacing either of the primary ones, but through supplying respite space it may actually facilitate or support participation in the spaces that “count.”

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Ray Oldenburg defines “third” places as “the core settings of informal public life.” 13 He uses the concept to describe regular and voluntary gatherings of people outside of home (his “first place”) and work (or school), the “second place” where you probably spend the most time. The third place, he says, is typified by four general attributes: it is free or inexpensive; it offers access to food and drink; it is within easy reach; and it houses regulars as well as new people. These places could be libraries, parks, hotel lobbies, or train stations in principle, but among all the options, Oldenburg chooses the café as the prime third place. Oldenburg’s concept includes the idea that such places can fuel modern “civil society,” generating a sense of wider community and the collective generation of social responsibility. The coffeehouse in Japan did at several periods provide the locus for such a modern idea, but more recently it has provided instead a respite space from the demands of responsibilities of all kinds, a time-out, not a generative center of political and social change. Cafés can be sociable or places of solitude in public; they can help like-minded people create new ideas and events. But as we will see, the café’s contemporary functions seem to have diversified, emphasizing its solatial power, its use as a retreat from the urban melee. Cafés take on the coloring and functions of their eras as well as their cultures and locales. Japanese coffeehouses, constructed at different eras and under different historical conditions from those of their European and American counterparts, did not resemble the locus classicus of coffeehouse democracy, the site of the creation of transformative political ideas described by Habermas.14 Habermas located the emergence of a new public voice in England’s eighteenth century in the English coffeehouse, where a shared discursive space, the basic apparatus of a modern society, might be found. Information passed freely there, especially that encouraging trade and enterprise, regardless of whether it actually bridged the social gaps of the day. Before there were mass media, before there was mass transportation offering experiences of new goods and ideas, there was the coffeehouse and communication by the cup. The availability of modern print and electronic media as modes of dissemination has not made the café obsolete; contemporary cafés in Europe, America, and Japan are useful assembly points for those who may desire to convene, newspapers and laptops included, to share space for a wide variety of reasons. It is this temporal, cultural, and social malleability, this multiplicity of function that makes cafés essential locations in modern societies. Although in the 1920s some coffeehouses in Tokyo and in Osaka

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were public stages for creative ideas and political debate, the primary function of the café as site of expression and change became more personal than political. Depending on the era, cafés in Japan have taken their shape as history and culture have dictated—and not as mirrors or emblems of either, rather as places where the official version of society is teased, challenged, or subverted. In contemporary Japan, where being alone in daily life is rare and perhaps problematic, and where casual meetings do not come easily, the café can offer the time and space for either society or legitimate solitude hard to find elsewhere. In Japan it is, among many other things we will note, a place to be publicly private, a social services center, a classroom for taste and consumption, a playroom, or a site of revolutionary creativity. Japanese coffeehouses arrived in the late nineteenth century when in a rush of modernization and technological development newspapers and mass transportation also appeared. Unlike the London coffeehouse, these coffeehouses were thus not exclusively locations for political or financial news. What the visitor found were new tastes, behaviors, and public engagements. As Donald Richie pointed out, in the coffee shop “is where one first glimpses the foreign innovation that will shortly become Japanese. In the musical coffee shops you first heard Schoenberg, in the artistic coffeeshops you first saw a picture of a Giacometti . . . many of the pieces of various foreign cultures are lying there.” 15 After all, what went on in the café was news enough. Similar to the London coffeehouse, the Japanese café has offered space for novelties: novel thought, taste, and material culture and discussions across social classes in a space where most aspects of conservative culture and role-borne responsibilities did not operate. What the coffeehouse in Japan has provided is both a public stage for performance of “unofficial” culture and a backstage where no performances at all need occur. The purchase of a cup and the securing of a seat in a café enables something not available in other sectors of a person’s life. And it is at least partly about space itself, the actual as well as the symbolic. Space is at a premium in Japan. The usual descriptor offered by Japa­ nese, which is said to explain much of Japanese society and culture, is “we are a small island country. . . . ” Living spaces are tiny by American or European standards, shops and offices are narrow, and walking on urban sidewalks is an exercise in avoidance, making paying attention a street survival skill. Space in which to be alone is even more rare. In Japan, the café as a “third space” might offer an unmarked time and place for people whose time and activities are by other institu 

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tions most deeply determined and consigned. While this might make them similar to cafés elsewhere, the marking of the individual in other contexts is such a strong determinant of activity and identity that the Japanese café has a persistent draw as a different sort of space from those in American and European cities. Being off-site and off-duty is highly desirable where site and duty commit a person so strongly. In addition, the Japanese café takes full advantage of the intrinsically protean quality of the place, and whatever its origins in England and Brazil, it soon took on Japanese functions, Japanese meanings, and Japanese coffee. Recently the number of independent cafés in Japan has decreased, but this does not signify fewer customers for cafés or a growing use of chain coffee shops like Doutor or Starbucks (whose appearance simply created a new customer base rather than poaching on that of the independent cafés), and it does not mean that new ones are not opening constantly. More likely it represents a natural correction, as those who risked all by leaving salaried employment to open cafés in the economic bubble years of the early 1980s are now retiring, and in these less optimistic times their children are less eager to be independent of the security of mainstream occupations. And yet they themselves cannot do without their kissaten. In fact, the number of hopeful people taking “café management” courses is high. Cafés have taken on many guises, depending on the taste of the owner. The café is the master’s domain, where he (or sometimes she) can perform a demonstration of fastidious coffee-making, teaching and serving taste through complicated alchemies that turn beans to brew with great care. Cafés also reflect regional variation, differences in use by males and females, and age-grading. From the very masculine clublike space of the café in the 1880s in Tokyo to the spaces where men and women could be both customer and server in the 1920s, cafés gradually became more inclusive along other lines of distinction as well. Cafés became miniature democracies, as they were for the most part socially unclassed. They also witnessed, and learned to take advantage of, changes in the use of time. As the white-collar labor force grew and unions protected the blue-collar worker from exploitative work hours, employees took their time out, and respites between work and home, at a café. Gradually the café also became a place where work and leisure activities met—where collegial meetings took place or where a worker might bring tasks to complete away from the oversight of managers. Students at all times have used cafés as study halls or places for testing  

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ideas, until in some areas school regulations made cafés off-limits for secondary school students. And finally, as homes became more private, less socially porous places, the kissaten or café became an intermediary institution in which casual or more deliberate social encounters could take place. Transport also played a part in creating patterns of café use: train and subway stations were obvious places for coffeehouses, as customers could spend time waiting there for a train or for a traveler. As the “salaryman” white-collar worker needed decompression from the work of the day, or on his way to the office, the train station café became a mainstay in his life. As the place for a last good-bye after a night of drinking, or a more or less anonymous meeting place for a dating couple, the station café is a great assist to social life.

How Cafés Diverged: Style and Function over Time The first cafés introduced English-style coffee to a wider clientele, mostly male and almost all rising middle-class urban customers. After 1907, as we will see in chapter 5, Brazilian coffee styles led the field. The Brazilian government had designated Japan as a principal overseas market for its coffees and returned Japanese Brazilians, often those who had migrated to Brazil to grow the coffee, brought the taste and culture of Brazil to Japan. The coffeehouse also demonstrated continental European styles, predominantly Viennese and Parisian. In the Taisho period, cafés began to serve alcohol and to offer the services of glamorous waitresses; it was then that the kissaten began to diverge from the café, which took on cabaret qualities. The latter were places of more gaiety and noise than the quiet kissaten, where no alcohol and no erotic waitresses disturbed the contemplative setting. These junkissa, or “pure kissaten,” were thus less attractive to lounge lizards and flappers. The junkissa were the haunts of artists, writers, and intellectuals, who took such places seriously as homes of argument and artistic display but who may also have repaired to the jollier cafés on occasion. After World War II, the kissaten recovered earlier than the cafés, for they served only coffee, which was at first easier to get than alcohol or food, both scarce until the mid 1950s. A kissaten today serves coffee—that is its main offering. A café with a food license might serve anything at all, from curry rice to sandwiches to snack foods and pastries, but almost no café serves what would be culturally designated as a “meal.” The exception might be the “morn 

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ing set” served in cafés and kissaten. This breakfast is usually toast, egg, and salad, and never a miso soup, rice, and pickle indigenous Japanese breakfast. Kissaten are usually open early in the morning and serve breakfast until 11:00 a.m., and often older people will take a late breakfast as a lunch then. At different times in the past 120 years the Japanese café has offered more than coffee, entertainment, public meetings, and private solace, for, depending on the era and many other variables, cafés have provided what the city dweller needs. This availability to changing conditions, this malleability, is related to the time and mode of the café’s entry to Japan, the fact that it began as a new place, not directly inheriting the social space of the chaya. The café’s novelty, suggested and reinforced by its new uses of public space—new chairs, tables, and decor—and the new social beverage of coffee itself did not fix its identity. New things continued to happen. While cafés looked outward, at first to foreign ways, and brought in cultural novelties from the West, they were and continue to be spaces from which the novel is created and disseminated. They arrived at a time when a new bourgeois sensibility, a more mobile “urbanity” was taking shape in Japan, which could be displayed, viewed, tested, and modified in cafés. Especially after the great Kanto earthquake of 1923, the cities of Osaka and Tokyo became even more intensely “café” cities, and Tokyo especially a pacesetter in architecture and city streets. The destruction of much of Tokyo in the earthquake meant first an exodus of café and cabaret owners to Osaka—then in its boom period—and second, the construction of new cafés and public spaces in the reconstruction, making Tokyo a more geographically integrated city. Social behavior was also in flux; at times of change, a place apart from more rigid cultural coding has a strong advantage. Further, the relative classlessness of the café both permitted and demonstrated social mobility— or at least social diversity—at the time.  

 

 

 

 

 

Modern and Urban in the Coffee Place The café itself was noted in the 1920s as the symbol of modernity and place for the creation of ideas. As one commentator of the time said, “The café was even more significant than the Diet.” 16 By this time, experiments in modern living included a wide variety of novelties both inside the home and outside. Modernization earlier in the Meiji period had meant national mobilization for economic and technological change, catching

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F igu r e 4. Café François in Kyoto. Photograph by Kondo Minoru.

up with the West and taking what was seen as useful in institutions and industrialization, but keeping “Western” influences in other sectors to a safe minimum. This selectivity in fact did not work as neatly as leaders might have wished. The phrase wakon yosai (Japanese spirit, Western technology) had a fine ring of cultural solidarity against the potential for incursions from outside into a newly imagined Japanese identity. But the actual preservation of the soul of Japan was to be managed through the adoption of those aspects of Western success and progress that could protect Japan against other aspects, such as values and behaviors. The yearning to learn more of Western culture far overshot the desire to protect something as vague as “Japanese identity.” After the first imitative cafés re-created Europe in Japan in the 1880s, however, these novel locations and their novel beverage became unremarkably local, in an unintended but effective solution to the “modern but not Western” dilemma. Their novelties and comforts were givens in the urban person’s life. One did not go to the café as an exotic space but rather as a functional and attractive place in one’s ordinary life. Coffee and the places where it was drunk became Japanese—far faster than did other foodstuffs and attire, still called yoshoku and yofuku, Western foods and Western clothing. Coffee (written in characters or written in the syllabary for foreign-borrowed words) had naturalized by the early 1900s.  

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Carol Gluck has said that in the nineteenth century European modernity was one of the “available modernities” for Japan to adopt, but in the prevalent conditions a Japanese modernity, a pass given to the specific historical past of Japan, was the product of all the many changes Japan was undergoing.17 Gluck’s idea of “improvisational modernity” might well describe the café as it underwent the determining changes of the Meiji and early Taisho periods. We are still in a state of this kind of modernity, generating novelty, creating new experiences, and, as Elise Tipton notes, the café continues to improvise.18 “Modern” in the late nineteenth century in Japan was a device by which Japan would save itself from foreign domination; it was a national security issue to upgrade Japan’s institutions and potential through borrowing the forms of bureaucracies, education, the military, and health care. But soon after, a more ground-level set of modernities appeared. Modernity, which at first expressed itself in the public eye with borrowed Western commodities and customs, could be on parade most easily in urban areas, while the countryside was effectively a place apart and “traditional.” The café in the city reflected and supported social mobility and the breakup of fixed class systems, while public spaces in the countryside such as village squares tended to reinforce social life as it had been. In the period of rapid industrialization between 1860 and 1890, the countryside came to the city as the population of workers for the factories was drawn from rural areas. The café was the logical place for these new migrants to learn city ways and comfortably observe, an inexpensive and novel drink in hand, how to get on in the world they’d just entered, so different from that of home. Later the word café began to mean a continental European style of establishment and kissaten, an ordinary neighborhood locale. What was considered modan (“modern” in European design of the Bauhaus, modernist type) was represented in cafés where design and decor were selling points to customers coming to learn of the novel and the European. The furnishings of kissaten would also have been “modern”—tables and chairs of simple and functional make—but they would not profess a modan style by design and intention. In the postwar kissaten, brown leatherette seats, dark wood tables, and perhaps mirrors and dark wood on the walls, with pressed metal ashtrays, constituted “design.” In the intentional aesthetic of the postwar café, light wood, bright colors, and large windows, with “Scandinavian” or Bauhaus-style furniture, were settings, by the early 1960s, for the novel and avant-garde scenes of activities such as gallery shows, musical performances, and literary events.  

 

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If the Japanese café was present at the creation of modernization, is it now present at its demise? As Tipton and others have said, the café represents the bootstrapping “modern” of early twentieth-century Japan: is it now only a passive location of nostalgia, or does it now represent something different—a reflection of newer projects and other concerns? The catch-up era of the early twentieth century was quickly replaced by a rapidly changing and diverse set of Japanese cultural modernities. One can find all kinds of modern—in fact, a veritable historical catalog—in the cafés of Japan: the speakeasy-type café of the 1920s as evidence of a louche decadence; the evocation of Vienna as denominator of a public culture that slipped easily into Japan; the daring p ­ erformance-art cafés of the postwar era, which made European existential and American “beat” cafés look tame by comparison; and now chain coffeehouses, reflecting the repetitive predictability of the mass market. But the cafés, except for Western chain stores like Starbucks, to most Japanese people are not “about Europe” or “about America”—they are completely Japanese.  

 

 

 

Work, Family, and New Measures of Value Public social spaces and acts of consumption may create novelties, but they also reflect social needs and change. What has been meant by “modern” and by “modernization” in Japan included both a new sense of time in education and industrial or bureaucratic labor and a new sense of family as a unit of consumption rather than a unit of production. In the 1870s, with the arrival of universal education, and later with industrialization, clocks began to measure and direct activity in work and school. By extension these institutions then governed the schedules of families as well. But there are gaps in place and time between home and the outside world that can be filled by active or passive participation in public spaces such as cafés. Time as the measurement of work, hours on task, which measures and rewards the employee, also gives the café its temporal place in people’s lives. Shibata Tokue describes the industrial city’s timescape in terms of the flows of people at specific and predictable times of day, from the morning intake to the center of the city to the late-afternoon start of the movement out again.19 The clocks of corporations and commerce were synchronized: employees ate, drank, and purchased on their way to and from the workplace, moving to various outer hubs on the transport systems. Today, at each node in the networks of trains and buses, there are points of purchasing and entertainment, places where

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people might seek recreation or respite. The rush hours of modern Japanese life siphon people from home to work but also in and out of less “designated” spaces, chief among which was and is the café. A look at cafés over the course of a normal day gives a sense of the importance of spaces like these in the schedules of life: early morning speed drinkers give way to housewives resting, then students and workers on times-out at lunch, and in the early to late afternoon older retired people wanting social time. Later visitors are postwork workers, and then the café might be a date location as well. Use also depends on the neighborhood: timing differs in residential neighborhoods. One of the tensions of modernity lies in the distinction between home and work. The home becomes a setting apart from the exertions needed to support it. Home, as we will see in later chapters, has changed from a location of production, as in agrarian, craft, or small-trade families, to a place where family is maintained through outside labors. It is the location of reproduction, the place where children are raised to support themselves and their families (and their no longer productive parents in their old age), and where women find their domestic and maternal definition. The primary identity for most men is conferred by the workplace; in postwar Japan that workplace has sometimes had more call on him than his family has, leading to a separation of spheres of activity between men and women and often to stress when demands from work compete with those from home.20 In modern industrial and bureaucratic Japan, work was no longer hereditary in fact or form—a carpenter’s son did not necessarily inherit the business and clientele when potentially more lucrative employment outside the home was available. Work now was earned through the credentials conferred on individuals measured through schooling. While large corporations framed virtue and success in more ideological ways, encouraging familistic bonding and ties of loyalty and obligation between worker and company, this did not change the ground-level understanding of the meaning of work. The corporate worker was encouraged to identify primarily with the workplace—as in the standard introduction, “I am Mitsubishi’s Watanabe”—implying that work hours and paycheck alone did not define membership in the company or investment in the work product. Typically, however, the ideology behind corporate identity and the experiences of work did not match: support and solidarity, family style, were rare in the office and on the factory floor. Time away from work became time for a different sense of self. Time out is very important, even in the snippets available to the corporate worker who rarely takes  

 

 

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his full vacation allotment. Leisure may be found at the seat of a café. More than do bars, cafés receive brief visits for “free time.” The compression of leisure—or rather, unassigned time—into a cup’s worth of time is also important as travel time to work increases and domestic space shrinks. While commuting distances have become greater, people want places that allow respite and a chance for a transition. The café is thus part of the transport system, bridging schedules and allowing for the fine-tuning of one’s arrival times. The typical Tokyo commuter has at least one hour each way to travel—and many have two—between home and work every day. In the travel itself, in the moments by which timing is perfected, the café has become the essential bridge. The exigencies of work culture may also produce gaps of time. As one businessman said, “The way we live today, we couldn’t do without the café.” He noted a special “cultural” use he considers vital to the enactment of business: if you have an appointment in Japan you must be absolutely on time, even a few minutes early. To be sure of that, you must arrive in the vicinity of your appointment even earlier. You will undoubtedly have fifteen or twenty minutes before arriving fresh and unharried at the precise moment. What but a café can fill that gap and smooth travel-worn nerves? To him, this simple fact of Japanese business etiquette alone may explain the ubiquity of cafés. Having pictures printed or shoes repaired, or waiting for the dentist? Cafés are where people wait in the Japanese city. The café to some became a home away from home, where social and personal needs might be met—where a date might be made with a casual friend or a time-out taken for reading the newspaper. To some it was an escape from the demands of the home. Housewives might visit a café as a break in their shopping, or as a break from the solitude of home, either for a quiet moment in a place where they have no responsibilities or for a social moment with a friend. The privacy of the home could be protected, or its isolation vitiated, by a sojourn in a café. At such times, you are not looking for distraction. The cup of coffee one buys to bide the time is sufficient purpose, as are the randomly read newspapers, magazines, and comics. Being in a space with no character is sometimes as important as being in a space whose character can entertain. This is the place, as Christine Yano noted, for “the true urbanite who knows the art of public loitering.” 21 Being in a space where one has no identity can be a relief when the demands of one’s other spaces are very great. The cafés this book treats mark the urban shift from tight village 

 

 

 

 

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like neighborhood locales to more neutral territories or unmarked social spaces between public and private zones in individual lives. In older neighborhoods the café may be an extension of the close-knit relationships of the community, but in modern urban sites cafés are places apart, where movement rather than stasis, accidental rather than predictable meeting, and novelty rather than familiarity shape experience: cafés encourage the new while protecting the ordinary in people’s lives. Temple or shrine grounds have served and continue to provide some of the functions of secular public spaces—time out from chores for older people to sit together, play space for small children, and friendly meeting places for their mothers. Public baths have been sites for urban community too but are more specifically tied to the function of bathing. Public parks, zoos, and recreational grounds appeared in the Meiji period, and train stations and department stores could be meeting places. Today’s train stations have specially designated meet points that mark this use, but one uses them only to connect and not as places for leisurely communication. The experiences of the café reflected, in the middle of the twentieth century, a novel middle-class “modernity” gradually being created in juxtaposition to older Japanese frames of life. Japanese modernity was a product of convergences of industry, technology, media, and urban development. A dining room table was not simply a piece of furniture but a wedge for change in family behavior. Tastes in fashion, decor, and food were in flux, and the mixtures (flapperish bobbed hair with a louche kimono; an ivory-handled cane with tall wooden geta; ketchup on rice croquettes) might be transitional or new forms setting down more permanent roots in Japanese material culture. Modernity in public spaces might be a third dimension cutting through a system where history and place lay out a two-dimensional map of change. The café, because of its inchoate form in an unmarked space, represents this third dimension, in which time and space are given new possibilities. The very fact that people who have no prior connection meet in the café, or sit in parallel to each other, with no personal connection, no introduction, no identity, makes it a modern space. That a woman could go there alone in 1923 made it historically modern. That one sat on chairs, not on floor matting, made it first Western, and then modern. That one chose coffee made it indisputably modern. In Japan now, “modernity” is an aesthetic, a brand selling nostalgia for a time when the modern was an object of cultural construction. Modern is a specific historical style including fashion, goods, ideas,  

Japan’s Cafés  |  37

and behaviors. Miriam Silverberg captured the confusion of modernity in the Taisho era in her discussion of the phenomenon called eroguronansensu—erotic, grotesque, and nonsensical—in the maelstrom of new ideas, of decadent posturing and lost souls.22 Modernity, then— especially among its protagonist artists, writers, and bohemians, some of whom we will meet later—meant the consumption of heterogeneous elements of culture, art, and behavior. It also referred to a state of mind that Mackie has called the “trance” of modernity.23 To call a café “modern” is to describe a café whose art, matchbooks, and furnishings are Japanese art deco, whether it is of that era or cast in that era’s mold to channel nostalgic yearnings for a more poetic or glamorous urban age. The later modern of the postwar years included the Bauhaus minimalist aesthetic of the 1950s and 1960s, and this too has now become an object of retro café design: it’s an irony that the Bauhaus minimalism was influenced by Japanese architecture. Urbanity can be as difficult to define as modernism in Japan: we need both to understand and to distance ourselves from meanings given by Western usage, and it is as vagabond a term as modernity. Colloquially in the West, urbanity is a set of qualities demonstrated by a person who is urbane: it appears to mean sophistication, worldliness, cosmopolitanism, a suavity that goes with knowing the right moves in social situations, a sense of “style” that characterizes appearance, manners, and goods. These are qualities that might be attached to a boulevardier, a person who “owns the streets”—a flaneur, as Baudelaire and later Wal­ ter Benjamin would describe him.24 Certainly being “at home” in a city makes one urban if not urbane. There are parallels to these meanings and understandings in Japan, notions of the person who is “urbane” that set him or her apart from the non–city person. The urbane person in Japan would not be parochial and would transcend the neighborhood, which by implication would be the narrow confines of a face-to-face community, to venture into more anonymous city spaces. Anonymity means “namelessness”; only outside your home spaces could you have no name.  

 

 

 

 

 

City Spaces Public social spaces are not universally available in modern cities. Important in modernity as places where one might be unknown to others, or free of the duties of known places, prior to the late nineteenth century such spaces in Japanese cities were few. Even today in Japan not all cit-

38  |  Japan’s Cafés

ies have public spaces like these—few open piazzas, like San Marco in Venice, open market squares as in Dakar, parks for recreation like New York’s Central Park, or official assembly points for public congregation like Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Modern cities might have railroad stations and shopping malls, huge vaulted hotel lobbies, and older spaces such as temple and shrine yards or the perimeters of the old imperial palaces. Japan’s cities rarely have such central spaces; their urban landscapes tend toward small sites of face-to-face encounters, in part because of their density and in part because of their historical evolution. Anywhere in the world, a city’s shape relates to its original function and development, and its particular points of origin determine to some extent its later public spaces. Some cities demonstrate the expansion of regional periodic markets into fixed communities; some mark the development of services at points along routes of passage and pilgrimage, secular or sacred; some, like medieval or feudal cities, embody the power of a ruler who commands a domain; and yet others derive from the creation and protection of a valuable port for river or ocean transport. Sacred cities such as Mecca, Dazaifu in Japan, or Varanasi in India were created through the power of religious organizations to own and develop land used for spiritual centers, and pilgrimage routes leading to them literally enriched the population of such places. Getting together in public, or individually inhabiting these public spheres, could be deliberate or accidental, coerced or uncoerced. How they may be employed as places for “uncoerced” association, voluntary congregation or random appearances, is the key to the use of public space in contemporary Japan. In Japan we see traces of older patterns of settlement. In Tokyo, created first as a castle town for the Shogun, there is a concentricity focused now on the imperial palace, with rings of services and production emanating outward from that center. In Kyoto, an imperial city, we see the Chinese-style grid of streets and markets in which is planted, mandalalike, the old imperial palace. Kobe, a port city, focuses on the waterfront, and Osaka is laid out along its mercantile distribution artery, the river. Along old pilgrimage routes, towns grew up to serve the pious travelers, and along the routes created in the Edo period by local feudal lords who were forced to travel to and from the capital there were rest and refreshment stops that became vital commercial towns as well. Cities combine deliberate construction and planning with accidental creation. In this way they may be both “natural” and “manmade” sites, and the spaces and their uses are related to the manner of their develop 

Japan’s Cafés  |  39

ment. Like cities themselves, most public space in Japan has been created by use rather than by design, just as footpaths created over generations of walking may eventually become roads for vehicular traffic. Few open spaces of more deliberate construction existed before the Meiji era, when the appurtenances of a nation-state were learned from Western capitals. A public park, a zoo, Western-style public museums, an open square, a boulevard—these would come only with the importation of such ideas learned by the first official emissaries to Europe and America in the 1870s. In Tokyo, the Champs-Élysées prefigured the boulevard of Omote­ sando, the “front entrance” to the Meiji Shrine built in 1920. Similarly, the Eiffel Tower later was echoed in the Tokyo Tower, and Shinjuku Gyoen, formerly an imperial park built in 1906 but now a national park, recalled French formal gardens and London’s Regent’s Park, while Ueno Park grew out of a Tokugawa-era temple space, boosted by the arrival of the railroad in the late nineteenth century, and collected in the 1920s national museums, a zoo, and other Western-style urban amenities. Public parks, wide-pathed Shinto shrines such as the Meiji Shrine in Tokyo, were nineteenth- and early twentieth-century creations. The public spaces of Japan, which were traditionally such places as temple grounds or market areas, have always been used for a range of unofficial purposes. These ordinary spaces evolved: a space in front of a door on a sunny day used for sitting might with the addition of a bench or a pair of stools become a neighborhood locus for sociability. The most fluid—and also the most “located”—public spaces are small in scale and spontaneously created. As the primary, foundational function of a place recedes (fewer people visiting temples for prayer, streets becoming noisy or dusty, or money for upkeep of a monument falling away) the people who live nearby, expanding from the narrow confines of their homes, tend to make at least temporary use of available turf. In Japan, where urban homes are typically small and increasingly private, social life has to move out— to outdoor spaces in fine weather, to shopping streets, parks, and dusty temple yards, now often the playgrounds for temple nursery schools. These accommodate spontaneous or semispontaneous meetings, along with acquaintances that are mostly restricted to the space itself. More deliberate meetings can be convened in the next layer of public space, places where a choice is made to meet, such as the café. Saskia Sassen’s discussion of “global cities” places New York, Lon­ don, and Tokyo within a model of connection and change: in her view,  

 

 

 

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a global city is one where four attributes can be seen. Such a city has a vital role in the world economy, and it is a focal location for financial services, a producer of innovations, and a market for selling those innovations.25 Global cities share these functions but, I would add, accommodate them quite differently. Tokyo’s old inner-city spaces, for example, display remarkable endurance in the face of transformations in the economy that pull Tokyo’s neighborhoods out of a traditional ­merchant/ shop model and into a “global” frame of meaning—from two-story shop-plus-home residences to high-rise luxury condominiums. It is likely that, having resisted the pulls of modern affluence, such neighborhoods might also resist the pushes of decline. Outmigration has not threatened them much, either; what might endanger them in the future are the aging population and the low birthrate, but even in hard times, many of these neighborhoods are revitalizing without gentrifying. Another way in which Japanese cities do not resemble the “global” model is in consumption: there is still a strong pattern of buying “local”— on foot or on bicycle—in shops near one’s home. Although there are now large discount stores, there are few shopping malls in outlying areas catering to car-bound consumers, though urban families with cars may on weekends travel to them if buying big-ticket items such as appliances or furniture. A walk or bike ride to the local shotengai, the traditional neighborhood cluster of shops, is a daily event for most housewives. The shopping street is the neighborhood’s gossip and information core— maintained as much from the habit of daily shopping as from the need of people to connect with those who know them. And in that cluster there will be a café. The “national” and the “global” coexist with these local spaces but do not dominate the experience of urban life for most middle-class people. The shopping street is a place of local relationships as well as the stuff of daily consumption, and it, like its cafés, emerges as a natural outgrowth of neighborhood. Cafés are alive and well. After the bubble economy of the 1980s burst in the early 1990s, coffeehouses were the places where inexpensive pleasures were still affordable. While other entertainments might be curtailed, going out for coffee was not: it was beyond reproach or, for most, financial constraint. A decline in numbers of cafés, as noted above, is not a decline in interest. It appears now that a new generation of coffee-loving, café-dreaming youth is opening novel coffeehouses: there are organic, esunikku (“ethnic”), and gallery-style cafés opening everywhere, and Web sites constructing and extending their audiences. There are new bookstore cafés, bakery cafés, and cat and dog cafés (where pets are wel 

 

 

 

Japan’s Cafés  |  41

come or available for petting); there are quirky “maid cafés” where geek tourists gather to see their favorite cartoon characters embodied; and there is the ashiyu café, where with a cup of coffee at hand you sit comfortably soaking your feet in a soothing hot mineral bath. At some hot springs resorts you may even have your feet “pedicured” by small flesheating fish while sipping a cup of coffee. There are the evocative retro cafés, where young people engage the styles, music, and decor of the early postwar kissaten. Nothing gets lost; new things do not replace but add to the plethora of possibilities in the café. Its social functions reflect what is happening in Japanese society and thus have changed over time. In the next chapter, a review of cafés in eras of modernization demonstrates both their essential malleability and their capacity to grasp and predict what will happen next.

Chapter 3

Modernity and the Passion Factory

By the turn of the twentieth century, being in a café in Japan was an act of outright modernity. As Elise Tipton notes, the café was the very site and generator of the modern.1 You entered a café as an act of personal choice, to be with and observe modern people. It was (and to some extent still is) a ludic space, a space of free play or a place where you were free to define yourself. You went there to “play” as in the Japanese word asobi, with its meanings of freedom and suspension of cultural responsibilities. In play you can engage new things “playfully,” without the responsibility of a larger, more authoritative undertaking. A café was a veritable stage set for novel performances. It was a shape-shifter or a neutral space where the atmosphere and fittings, and thus the experience, could change often. It was where you could escape the norms of cultural and social obligation; you could go there to be somewhere or nowhere. The contrast between who you were expected to be at home and work and the new more fluid and individualist ideas of social and personal identity was so great that it could be said to necessitate this new place as a bridge between them. Instead of becoming (as at home or work) what the place demanded, you could become there what the space permitted. Those most under the scrutiny of cultural correctness, middle-class women, might find cafés particularly rewarding. Women, as we have seen, had entered some public realms already and were notably ready for the freedoms of the café. Indeed, one sign of a modern place was the presence of women as customers, and not only as 42

Modernity and the Passion Factory    |   43

F igu r e 5. Kissa Soiree in Kyoto. Photograph by Kondo Minoru.

backstage staff or servers. A middle-class woman of “good family” could be seen in public places such as the Fugetsudo in Azabu, a place for confectionery, ice cream, and coffee. By 1893, this shop primarily served women, whose sweet tooth was created and sated there. The Shiseido Company’s “parlors,” which were evident from the first years of the twentieth century, also catered to elite, well-bred women. Department store cafés such as that at Mitsukoshi Department Store in Nihonbashi, Tokyo, were quite safe, socially, for ladies who shopped, as were the “fruit parlors” where parfaits and fruit desserts were served. “Passion” as a product of the café would be found later, as we will see in the cabaret-style café where women very different from these were on view. After 1897, when the milk hall (miruku horu) appeared, women and men together consumed Western foods and drinks. Originally established as milk stations for purchase and delivery, milk halls in the late Meiji era began to serve coffee. The term milk hall by 1912 was a place where impecunious students and ordinary people might gather; the “erotic service” that we will see being provided by waitresses in the Ginza kissaten was nowhere in evidence. Some kissaten began as milk halls, and some milk halls were places of fashion and modernity—where young men imbibed the modern drink of “coffee-milk.” During the Taisho period, coffee places began to diversify, to split  

44   |   Modernity and the Passion Factory

from one another along different antecedent lines. Out of milk halls and Tei Ei-kei’s Kahiichakan, a London-style coffeehouse, came today’s ordinary neighborhood kissaten. Along another line of descent, out of the Japanese premodern teahouse with its entertaining women, emerged the erotic and “modern” waitress cafés and the cabaret, serving, along with coffee, a noisier scene energized by alcohol and sex. These places were in a cabaret style, with live music and booth seating (sometimes with gauzy curtains to protect ladies from view or couples from public disapproval). Modern furnishings, such as electric lamps and neon, were introduced in all kinds of cafés and coffeehouses. The use of tables and chairs marked cafés as Western, places where you sat on a chair and kept your shoes on, rather than Japanese, places where you folded your shoeless feet under you on a tatami floor. For many, this was a new kind of intimate space—relaxing with one’s shoes on was not conventional. In some new “artistic” kissaten today, sitting at a common low table on tatami matting gives a nostalgic cachet, evoking a more civilized, relaxed past. But in a mild irony, the kissaten of the historical era to which their nostalgia beckons had only Western-style table and chair seating. By 1901 there were about 145 Western-style cafés and eating places in Tokyo, competing with more than 6,000 Japanese-style eating and drinking establishments (with no coffee), but by the time of the 1923 Tokyo earthquake, Japanese tea shops had been mostly replaced by Westernstyle coffeehouses, especially in the fashionable Ginza area.2 In this area of posh and novel nightlife, the first beer hall was founded in 1899, and there was a kind of competitive fervor for trends. Cafés soon dominated, serving the strolling flaneurs, artists, and writers. Not all trends favored social life and the bustle of fashion on the street. Another new experience was that of being solitary, and some cafés, usually not of the cabaret variety, encouraged this indulgence. Being alone in a café was modern, and coffee flavored this new solitude. Indeed, the very modernity of the café lay in the novelty of the experience of privacy and anonymity in public. Not all “third places” are communities, or at least not all are places of explicit communication. As coffee became Japanese, cafés became Japanese and were no longer seen as offering foreign experiences, though at first cultural fashions from London, Paris, and Vienna were selling points. But although Tei Ei-kei, the initiator of modern cafés in Japan, amused himself in New York and London coffeehouses, it was neither America nor western Europe that dominated foreign influence in coffee and cafés: the  

Modernity and the Passion Factory    |   45

first significant café successes were Brazilian in aesthetic and gustatory taste. In fact, the world’s first global coffeehouse chain was a JapaneseBrazilian group, established in Japan in 1908 and in Shanghai before 1911. Seattle was seventy years in the future and, as it turns out, not the major player one might think it would be when it arrived in Japan; the domestic versions were to dominate in the end.

The Paulista Phenomenon: Brazil Chooses Japan As we will see in chapter 5, Japanese workers had an important part in creating Brazil’s dominant coffee industry, and they became coffee importers serving as intermediaries between Brazilian coffee producers and the marketers of coffee in Japan. Mizuno Ryu, Japan’s first “coffee czar,” was a coffee worker in Brazil who later developed an immigration service for migrant farmers from Japan to the area around São Paulo. He created the Café Paulista as the first Brazilian-style café in Tokyo in 1908. The chain of Paulistas and Brasileiros he soon established served as showrooms for the coffee he imported from Brazil. By 1911 there were more than twenty Paulistas in the Kanto and Kansai areas of Japan. The Café Brasileiro opened in Osaka in 1931 and later in Tokyo, Kobe, and Kyoto as a promotional campaign by the government of São Paulo to sell Brazilian coffee. The first Paulista, glittery with chandeliers, Brazilian flags, and gilded furniture, was in a three-story white building on the Ginza. The customers were served coffee by waiters dressed in Brazilian naval uniforms with epaulets and gold bindings. The Paulista had mirrored walls and wooden floors—if you wore geta, tall wooden Japanese sandals, you had to take them off, but if you wore Western shoes, you could leave them on. The Paulista was an instant success. Among its attractions was a long day, open from 9:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. It developed several distinct clienteles over that day: morning workers, midday break-takers, and afternoon and evening entertainment seekers. Cafés of this era, according to Uekusa Junichi, were democratic places, and coffee was seen as a drink free from social hierarchy.3 Of course, when it was first imported, it was available only to the wealthy, but with the Brazilian supplies pouring in at the turn of the century, coffee came to be an indulgence for most people. Before the Paulista, customers in cafés were charged extra for sugar; Mizuno offered it for free, and other cafés followed suit. The  

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coffee was thick and dark and Mizuno also introduced coffee syrup as an early form of “instant” coffee, allowing coffee to be made easily at home. Savory snacks and Portuguese/Brazilian-style doughnuts (malasada) were served. No customer was moved along, no matter how long he stayed, and yet there was high turnover of seats. Coupons were issued with discounts, and a catering service was also provided. The place was a showroom of modernity, exhibiting films and offering a player piano. One could rent space at the Paulista for wedding receptions, publication parties, or poetry readings. Mori Ogai, a novelist, frequented the Paulista Ginza location. Famous poets such as Kitahara Hakushu (1885–1942) and his friend and colleague, Isamu Yoshii (1886– 1960), founders of literary groups such as the Pan no Kai (Society of [the god] Pan), and Subaru (Pleiades), wrote traditional tanka poetry to be printed on the backs of Paulista’s receipts, which became collectible souvenirs.4 Two of these receipt tanka poems demonstrate the lyrical, contemplative side of Japanese café modernity (my translations):  

 

Yawarakana dare ka nomisashishi kissazo murasaki no toiki yuruku noboreru (Kitahara Hakushu) Some gentle person left a cup unfinished in the café; a deep evening breath makes my spirit climb Kissa no kaori ni musaburu to yori yume miru hito to narini kerashimo (Yoshii Isamu) In the late afternoon, the smell of coffee transforms me into a person who can dream

With all its novel and entertaining possibilities, Paulista had staggering numbers of visitors. In the Tokyo main shop, 70,000 customers visited per month—about 2,300 per day—and in Osaka, 52,000; in Kobe, 28,000 per month.5 With such popularity, Paulista also had its detractors; in the 1920s it was known by some (who avoided noisy, crowded cafés with alcohol and music) as the “kahei-busoku-renchu no shukaijo” (hangout for bums). Paulista nevertheless achieved great success as the world’s first coffeehouse chain. Brazilian coffee had a strong promotional campaign behind it—not only Mizuno’s, but those of Brazilian government agencies and the Brazil Trade Company, which first published its trade journal, Brasileiro—the first coffee trade journal in Japan—in 1930. Coffee literary journals and  

 

 

 

 

Modernity and the Passion Factory    |   47

a women’s literary journal, Fujin Bungeigo, appeared in 1935, edited by Hasegawa Shigure and supported by coffee industrialists. The café could take any cultural form and display any novelty. Artist Maruyama Shozo founded Café Printemps or Plantain (“Purantan” in Japanese pronunciation) in Tokyo in 1907—the first French-style café, modeled on the Parisian brasserie Le Procope, serving food and wine as well as coffee.6 His own paintings decorated the walls, anticipating later café- galleries. Meson Koonosu (Maison Connoisseur) created in Tokyo’s Nihonbashi an ikoku joocho, an attractive exotic mood. The first Osaka café to be called a café, Kafe Kisaragi in Shinsekai, Osaka, was founded in 1910, a worldly Euro-style place where the “old middleclass” merchants convened. Some Ginza cafés so actively embraced their “educational” function, teaching modernity, that they kept their doors open deliberately to allow strollers to gaze in, and to allow customers in all their urbanity to be seen. By 1932, some had outdoor patios, Euro­ pean style. The Café Tiger opened in 1907, with waitresses (café waitresses were called jokyuu) and a lively evening scene, competing for Ginza customers with Printemps. It was almost immediately followed by the Café Lion, where a large mechanical lion statue roared when a customer purchased a liter of beer. The Tiger banked on the beauty of its waitresses and did not at first provide alcohol. The advent of professional waitresses was a striking turn in the life of the café. Novelist Nagai Kafuu haunted the Lion and was the object of attempted blackmail by one of the waitresses who served him.7 In the “trancelike” state of the café, eroticism dominated over communication, fantasy over intellect. In Nagai Kafuu’s novella During the Rains, he portrays the slippery and to him dangerous moral state of the café worker and customer. And yet, as one commentator suggests, Nagai Kafuu himself preferred the freedom of this back-alley society to what he felt were the pretentious and hypocritical formalities of elite life.8 If the street was a dark pleasure zone, it was also to him a place of “real life,” of truth, especially in the realities of women whose livelihood was in the performance of sex and hospitality.  

Female Modernity: Taisho Café Waitresses and the Café as Erotic Space The Taisho era has a cultural power far greater than its brief tenure as an era.9 Its tag is often “democracy,” and its political ferment is often cited as evidence of a new openness, as Japanese culture took advantage

48   |   Modernity and the Passion Factory

F igu r e 6. Ryugetsudo classical music café in Kyoto. Photograph by Kondo Minoru.

of the exploration of the foreign that took place in the Meiji era and created new opportunities for social and political change. It also is characterized as a period of feverish activity in arts and design, in personal style and public life. “Modern” in the café was female—whether embodied in the moga (modern girl) or the waitress.10 The waitress, hired to represent and sell modernity, was less free than the moga to choose her style and express herself in it. Moga and mobo, the modern girl and boy of Japan’s jazz age, were types created by a newspaper reporter, and were to the general public both attractive and repellent. A modern girl, to conservative eyes, was the epitome of self-absorbed absurdity and irresponsible denial of social standards, adopting Western trends such as attending movies and cafés and wearing short skirts. By cutting their hair to a flapper (called furappa) bob or danpatsu, modern girls became epitomized by their hair, sometimes being called “cut-hair girls.” 11 They also were new women simply by virtue of opening their mouths and showing their teeth; in the past, women would not smile with open mouths and would cover their mouths to hide their teeth. Displaying in this way was both shocking and modern. Moga were subject to the standards of all classes, since their numbers included elites, well-educated middle-class women, and shopgirls  

Modernity and the Passion Factory    |   49

or factory workers saving from their wages to affect the styles of the street. They ranged from those wanting to embody the feminists’ ideals of choice and aspiration to those taking advantage of the freedom of urban life to parade new fashions and to develop what were labeled “strange relationships” with young men (called abekku, for the French avec, meaning “together”), the object of gossip and considerable anxiety in their families. In jazz cafés, such as Ginza 5-chome’s Prince or Ginza 2-chome’s Miyako Saboo, or eating the famous cake at Monami in Ginza 7-chome, they were consciously on display and subject to censure. Conservative criticism said they were shameful; Marxists said they were hedonistic, decadent bourgeoises. More than their male counterparts, the mobo, they bore the brunt of criticism of the modern. The revolution in social forms, appearance, and behavior thus happened most visibly—and with most shock value—among women. They embodied modernity and consumed it themselves. Just by their presence in cafés, women performed a modern act—that of being in public. The café waitress was “modern” in the ways in which she redesigned public social behavior and even the habits and styles of men. Waitresses were hired to attract male customers and also to feminize the spaces that had been exclusively masculine. Their “cultural power,” however, was more abstract than their concrete dependency on male customers for their livelihood. Drawing on erotic suggestion, waitresses could at least temporarily create the illusion that they were in control. Flirtation was a necessary art, a professional skill, and provocative attentions were calculated to yield the highest tips from the greatest number of customers; but there was difficulty when a customer fell in love and worse if the waitress did. The necessary distance between client and entertainer had been breached; the performer was no longer in control of the customer in such cases, and the waitress was at risk. They usually had “stage names,” allowing some separation between the character they took on as performance and the life they lived offstage. But they were often subject to unwelcome attentions, as their public presence was sometimes read to mean availability for sexual dalliance. Like the “stick girls,” the women who acted as paid escorts for boulevardiers, like a walking stick or what we might now call “arm candy,” waitresses were desired, interchangeable, and disposable. Among novelists and aspiring artists, waitresses represented inspirations of a different kind. Different from cafés in Europe, where most servers were male, Japanese café staff were uniquely female. “One could  

 

 

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not imagine the café without the café waitress.” 12 In the enclosed banquette of a café, a writer might focus on a distant female customer or be flirtatiously engaged with a waitress. Some writers preferred simply to keep the image of a favorite one in mind, as a fantasy and muse, while others became more physically engaged, such as in the “subway service” provided in some cafés, where customers could fondle a waitress through strategically placed slits below her kimono waist. It was romance, however, not sex, that brought many young men to the café, whether it was dreams of love with a waitress (hopelessness added to the romance) or a flirtatious encounter with a “modern girl” customer. These young dreamers could not provide what the waitress needed— stability and financial resources—and love or sex with a starving artist was impractical, or dangerous. If she found her feelings engaged with a customer, she was indeed imperiled. Any woman unwise enough to trust in such a relationship usually lost both the man and her livelihood. Forced to be independent in the world of entertainment, she found it hard to sustain herself. She needed money. Her employer forced her to buy her expensive kimonos herself, however required for work they were. Her salary was low and she counted on tips to keep her in kimonos. The common understanding among male customers about tips was that “you could get away with 50 sen as a tip, one yen is usual, two is welcome and if you give the waitress three yen, she will remember your face.” 13 Managers often tried to force waitresses into liaisons with wealthy (married) patrons, in the style of the danna patrons of geisha, whose liaisons with rich and influential men were socially acceptable and benefited the “house,” but they were not encouraging if the waitress chose an impractical romantic entanglement. To keep from literal starvation, or from falling off the stage of almost-respectability, was difficult. The waitresses’ attempts to reconcile their performances with dreams of what the rest of their lives might include—the chance for a stable marriage, for example—led them to recognize paradoxes in relationships, the contrast between “romance” and reality in the game of attraction and saleswomanship. Their roadside chaya forerunners employed this kind of emotional management in their “play” with customers. Waitresses were, however, less protected than prostitutes and party-hostess geisha, who usually kept the boundary intact between their evanescent “flower and willow world” and their workaday and family lives. Modernity and the rapidity of social change seemed to offer mobility and the potential for social and economic border-crossing. In a sexual liaison,  

 

 

 

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however, there was still great potential for status slippage and emotional stress. As Nagai Kafuu offers in the words of an old geisha, “Waitresses are at least respectable types on the surface. No matter what they do, they can gloss it over.” 14 While this may not always have been true— as scandal could pull a woman down several levels—it was at least an example of the new fluidity of status. Waitresses served as models for fictional characters in the1920s and 1930s. As in Tanizaki Junichiro’s novel Naomi, in the less-traditional world of the café, a certain bohemian style blurred cultures of class and patterns of behavior. Naomi, a flapperish, freethinking or at least freebehaving café waitress, is the “quintessential literary evocation” of the café waitress.15 The romance of the waitress was captivating. Hirotsu Kazuo’s proletarian novel in a lamenting, minor key, Jokyuu, was serialized in Fujin Koron at the end of the 1920s and was made into a movie. The theme song of this film, “The Song of the Waitress,” was popular in 1929. Another famous novel of the era, Ginza Hacchome, by Takeda Rintaro, featured a waitress who lived with a novelist, and others were set in cafés famous themselves as sites well known to readers. The borrowed landscape (shakkei) of a café automatically conferred a specific mood and feeling to a work of fiction. As the glamour (by definition a transient quality) of the waitress grew in the early 1920s, in part because of the writings or presence of the novelists and poets, so did their public image: some became quite well known, their fame eclipsing that of the cafés for which they worked. As “independent” women, they transcended older values and definitions of female virtue, as well as definitions of women as traditional workers; they became, as Tipton notes, one version of “modern girls.” As such they were also models for other young women, not only in fashion but also in behavior. The moga’s ideal of “free love” without the hindrances of old-fashioned marriages and restrictive women’s roles was rare for anyone to achieve, moga or waitress. And any failures in such radical schemes were the woman’s fault. For artists and writers too, there were ambiguities in the café as far as women were concerned. In Tanizaki’s Naomi, his risk-taking café waitress slips between social levels as well as between respectability and shady living. In 1929 Tanizaki wrote, “I have a strange aversion to cafés. The reason is that they appear to be places for eating and drinking, whereas in reality eating and drinking are secondary to having a good time with women, and yet the women aren’t always at your side to wait  

 

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on you. Such a shady, ambiguous set up is distasteful to me. . . . That’s what they were like when I knew them. A café was a place where you went to run after women, not to have a good time with them.” 16 This ambiguity was amplified by the fact that waitresses were most likely lower-middle-class women or women whose work might support a brother’s education or other middle-class pursuits. The waitress was often educated, sometimes herself a writer, playing an adventuress or a liberated modern woman among other roles. She might expect a new world in which men and women could consort with each other outside family and marriage relationships. And yet she kept what Silverberg calls “a patronizing critical distance” from her customers, realizing, for the most part realistically, that her stake in her own future was better served by professionalism than by romance.17 Ambiguously situated between disreputable and marriageable, jokyuu literally embodied the contradictions and nuances of modernity. In essence, then, these waitresses represented the cutting edge of fashion and behavior, as almost-respectable urban women, as superstar models of modish clothing, and as objects of desire, consummated or not. Their class status was at best “irregular.” Some have referred to them as the proletariat of the new urban culture—as one commentator said, the jokyuu’s place was the joonetsu koojoo or “passion factory.” 18 She was the epitome of alienated labor. Her role in fashion was more powerful than her social position might have indicated. Geisha up to this time had been the arbiters of style— displaying new patterns for their kimonos and new hairstyles, guides for fashionable women. But the jokyuu, attired in modern kimono patterns and fashions, usurped the geisha’s role as trendsetter and relegated geisha to the status of preservers of tradition.19 But even geisha had changed. The white powder worn by Edo-period geisha as well as by aristocratic women was prohibited in 1870, along with tooth blackening (which did persist for some time among geisha), as too exotic and alien for a modern (Western) country, and the dangers of the lead the powder contained compounded the problem. A lead-free powder was created in 1904, but by then only actors in Noh and Kabuki theater used it, though traditional geisha such as those of Pontocho or Gion in Kyoto continue to lighten their faces with what is called uguisufun (nightingale droppings), which give them a masklike appearance. The pattern of cultural preservation had already been set in the Meiji period, for as novel forms of entertainment came to Japan, more traditional Japanese forms such as Kabuki theater became stylized and fixed,  

 

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losing their flexibility in service to conservation of a “Japanese” art. An apt analogy can be drawn with food. “Japanese cuisine,” which had not existed as a concept until the late nineteenth century, became codified as traditional in the face of incursions of foreign dishes and culinary ideas. Leaving “tradition” to the geisha, by the Taisho era waitresses wore the newest art deco fabric designs, or wore their décolletage more daringly, sometimes dipping in front rather than in back as was customary. Hairstyles became “Western” gradually, as swept-back hairdos (soku­ hatsu)—pompadours, chignons—allowed women to keep their hair long but to adjust it to Western modes. The Taisho era saw a complete change, as swept-back hair was made “modern” by the use of the curling iron. The boyish bobbed-hair look of the flappers also became a waitress style; they often wore their hair waved or curled, and their kimonowearing had a very different look from that of the helmet-wigged geisha. Although by the end of the 1920s a period of growing repression shut down some cafés, it was also known as the golden age of cafés, especially in Osaka. And there were signs that women might not take their situation lightly. By 1930 there were eight hundred cafés and 10,000 waitresses in Osaka alone, and in 1933, 37,000 waitresses across Japan, a number that rose to 111,700 in 1936.20 Tipton describes the creation of a waitresses union in Osaka, the Osaka Jokyuu Doomei, which engaged in campaigns to get café owners to pay for their laundry, among other things. They joined in May Day labor demonstrations in 1922, and attempted a strike—but their organization did not last long. Waitresses, she says, represented a new kind of “pink collar work” and could take advantage of new strategies for workers.21  

 

 

After the Earthquake: New Urban Scenes On September 1, 1923, the Great Tokyo Earthquake destroyed much of the Ginza and Tokyo’s “low city” entertainment quarters, the sakariba. The center of commerce and business moved westward and changed the direction of café history. Osaka’s entertainment quarters became the center of novelties as some owners moved their establishments out of Tokyo. Osaka’s modern pleasure quarters exploded with novelty and fed the popular frenzy for music, dance, and spectacle. The cabaret-style café became identified more with Osaka than with Tokyo, where cafés were generally quieter places, now located in more sober surrounds in business districts. In Tokyo, Nagai Kafuu, perhaps because of having been burned by jokyuu scandal himself, began to advocate for serious

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places where only coffee was drunk and where writers and intellectuals might be free from distractions. He wrote that cafés had become dissolute places where “table service” meant a waitress going under the table to give a client oral sex, and, perhaps in prurient reaction, fulminated against these places as “vulgar, bad and ugly.” By the end of the 1920s, the Ginza, he felt, had become inaka—“bumpkinish” and unrefined.22 By the early 1930s, Nagai Kafuu sought out the junkissa, the “pure café” where only coffee and serious people characterized the space. The “pure café,” which Nagai Kafuu preferred, attracted people whose own seriousness was enhanced by being there—providing a kind of credential or social capital as well as a proper setting for intellectual exchange. Junkissa served no alcohol and had no live music, and the servers were all male. These spaces also attracted female writers and artists and served a new bohemian clientele. Café society in these places was of a different type from that of the nightclub crowd of the Ginza cafés: these were coterie places where random customers could be included but usually stayed to the margins of discussions. These cafés were well known by those on the artistic-literary circuit, and in the mid to late 1920s brought many painters and writers returning from Paris or Vienna to settings that recalled the European cafés they had left. The cabaret-style cafés, where jokyuu might have drawn attention away from more serious matters, continued to provide useful material for tragic and romantic stories. By the late 1920s, urban student culture was very diverse, including students who grouped themselves by interests, such as medical students or art students, and students from all over Japan, from Kyushu to Hokkaido. All were attracted to the bustling places of entertainment, as well as to more contemplative places or social spaces where long hours could be spent in the company of other students, who might tolerate a long-winded friend if they too could have a chance at the “stage” of the café. The split between café and cabaret and between coffeehouse and kissaten during this era presaged the contemporary uses of these places. Cafés for artists and writers, and the quiet cafés of the salaried worker, are tied through the original kissaten/coffeehouse style. Cabarets and cafés of the popular sort took in anyone ready to feed the beer tiger and keep the rowdiness to a dull roar. It was the “salary-fication” of public spaces that turned cafés to more anonymous uses. The styles that merged and became “ordinary kissaten” included “hidden” holein-the-wall (kakurega, anabateki) kissa, where a pot of coffee was kept  

 

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warm—and often burned, as the frequenters said; these were places where being a regular counted more than the taste of the coffee. Their long hours meant that random visitors late or early could take a break, ask directions, or just rest with a cup. Accidental visitors to such a place used it, as one older respondent said, without caring who came or who stayed—like a public toilet, he said. As the overhead train tracks created spaces underneath the Yamanote circle line of Tokyo (which was completed in 1925), these places housed yatai, stalls for food and rest. Most were temporary structures, but as their popularity grew they built walls and doors to protect the sitters from the weather. Subarugai (a constellation of such stalls) near Yura­ kucho station formed a line about ten in a row by the postwar years. There were also “brown cafés,” which offered dishes like purin (crème caramel) and castera (sponge cake) along with the coffee. After about 1930, Japan’s coffeehouse history continued to branch into diverse types of cafés, serving different functions but not always different clients. Coffee-serving locations of quite disparate types might serve the same clientele, as the customer of a French-style pastry and coffee shop might easily visit a cabaret with friends on a later stroll on the Ginza, to be followed by a more sober late-night discussion in a junkissa. After World War II, cafés on the whole were brighter than the prewar ones, taking on a more cheerful aspect as owners tried to lure more customers—especially women, to whom the darker, seedy ones were not welcoming. Women were now seen as a major customer base for public sipping, and cafés needed to please them. New customers also might want places where they could be comfortably anonymous; the coterie cafés or cafés where everyone knew one another were literally not for everyone, and not necessarily welcoming to strangers.  

 

 

Aesthetic Pursuits on the Global Café Stage Cafés witnessed a twentieth-century flow of creativity that moved artists, writers, and their cultural products, transforming and shaping their ideas across national boundaries. To take a hypothetical case, a German artist sitting with a Japanese painter in the Café Purantan in Tokyo, for example, was not learning from “the Japanese” but from a particular painter in a particular café space, and that painter himself had many different cultural reference points. The popularity of the Café Purantan, Meson Konosu, and other French-

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influenced cafés echoed popular feeling that France was culturally superior. This notion, expressed in novels, art, and music, led to official prohibition of the dissemination of works such as Nagai Kafuu’s Furansu Monogatari (Tales of France), which was banned in 1909. The image persisted, however, in part because the cafés became locations of quiet resistance to the government’s cultural chauvinism. The café, after its first appearance, eventually provided a space neither “Japanese” nor “Western”—it had no fixed identity. This permitted the display of ideas and art forms that also had no scripted conventions. The café was a known entry point to the networks of people engaged in similar artistic endeavors; Japanese artists connected to or observed others in cafés abroad just as they did at home. Mori Ogai, who was a student in Germany from 1884 to 1888, places his protagonist writer in Maihime in a Berlin café, where he sits anonymously observing as he writes his essays with an urgent fluency. This space away from home enables the character’s work, and we suspect it did that of Mori Ogai himself. For the Japanese artist abroad, cafés were familiar places, sites offering a sense of competence in new urban places. Cafés were recognizable stations along the line of transit for artists, from Tokyo to Shanghai to Vienna, Berlin, and Paris. The café user, the train rider, the museumgoer, these people knew the use of public spaces, a knowledge that translated easily to foreign environments. This knowledge permits easy assimilation: in a café, for example, you claim a table that you will inhabit for a time, your space. You order coffee. There are no other significant behavioral demands on you, and having mastered the particular variant your café represents, you do as you please, with proper attention to the spaces of others, and the auditory or physical space you take up yourself. Being “at home”—or seeming to be—in such places is the reward for learning modernity. Artists, like everyone else, went to cafés for a variety of purposes. They convened to keep up with new ideas, to share space with people like themselves or with those they admired. Cafés housing artists in Japan took on the luster of Parisian cafés, such as those where the Impressionist painters assembled or, later, where writers like Hemingway showed up. Some cafés became gallery-cafés, allowing artists to show their work. Novelist Tanizaki Junichiro, for example, added his fame to the Café Tsukiji in Kyoto. Cafés in the late Meiji and early Taisho periods had diversified, adding to the range of possibilities beyond the individually determined  

 

 

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functions and choices, but even the neighborhood “local” could be the home away from home, the space neither home nor work, the place to be alone, or the place where you are sure to meet friends. Like many modern restaurants, the café had only a roughly outlined schedule of service: you could arrive and leave more or less on your own timing. This aspect of the freedom of the café as an urban public space suited the bohemian artistic life, for while an early riser had a coffee at eight, a midnight-oil burner could have her first at two in the afternoon. Time in the café had a slippery quality: life inside and outside the café might be on very different clocks. As Nagai Kafuu evocatively described it, “Even though it was still light outside in the long summer evening, inside the café, from early on, there was a nighttime liveliness”; and later, “At all the cafes in the Ginza . . . after ten p.m. towards closing time, it usually got very crowded, all of a sudden. The noise of the constantly playing phonograph intermittently drowned out by the clamour of voices, mingled with the clatter of plates amid drifting motes of dust and cigarette smoke.” 23 The Taisho period saw many embellishments and extensions of the offerings at cafés. Some became gallery showcases for Western goods and art, and walls were hung with the works of the artists who sat there— and who, if lucky, sold their paintings or found a patron. Certain cafés became known by the art, and artists, or vice versa, as artists were associated with a particular café and its “school” of painting or sculpture. Before the early 1900s, a scattering of artists (that is, painters, sculptors, and other practitioners whose work gained them sufficient fame in Japan to be listed in biographical directories) had traveled west, often to Shanghai, and farther to Paris, Rome, and Vienna. In the later years of the Meiji period, a number of Western art teachers taught at art schools in Japan, notably Ernest Fenellosa, who taught at Tokyo Bijutsu Gakuen, and Antonio Fontanesi and A. Sangiovanni, who taught at Kobu Daigaku. Experiences with foreign teachers in Japan motivated many art students to go to Europe for further study. Their exposure to Western art and architecture, compounded by sojourns in the cafés of major cities, gave them not only strong influences for their work but also connections to people who encouraged them. The peak years of artistic sojourning in Europe were from the early 1880s to the early 1890s and again from 1921 to 1929. There was almost no travel to and from Europe during World War I. Ebihara Kinosuke, in Paris from the mid 1920s to the mid 1930s, there met Leonard Foujita (perhaps the most famous of expatriate Japanese artists),  

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who helped him to exhibit in the Salon d’Automne and the Salon des Indepén­dants, as one of the first Japanese abstract expressionists. Foujita was born Fujita Tsuguji (or Tsuguharu) in 1886; he lived sixteen years in France and was naturalized there as Leonard Foujita in 1955. He died in 1968. His work includes paintings and sketches of Paris cafés, the most famous the painting called Café showing a contemplative blond woman in a low-cut black dress. Her bland expression can be read as deep or as trivial, but what seems to matter for Foujita in this painting is the decor: the classic elements of a French café, waiters, dark wood tables, newspaper rack, surround his subject, who may be a stand-in for the artist, yearning to be sitting on the leather banquette himself.24 Most Japanese artists and writers who took in the cafés of Paris, Berlin, Vienna, and Rome traveled independently and often were financially impoverished. The cost of sitting in a café was sometimes borne by friendly French artists, or sometimes by the local women who befriended them—possibly Foujita’s café-dwelling woman among them. Occasionally Japanese artists and writers became actively involved in the ferment of politics in such cafés.25 Those who had arrived earlier stayed on, and some went on to America, where the New York art scene, and the darkly entertaining bohemian scene of Greenwich Village, attracted more Japanese artists. Some who returned to Japan in the early 1930s found Japanese cafés thriving and found themselves lionized as having “been to the source.” The Japanese café had become what artists and writers needed, a place to perform and to validate their creative selves, what Ian Condry calls—for Japanese hip-hop performers, much later— the genba, the “real space where things happen.” 26  

 

 

Jazz: The Sound Track of Modernity Cafés were also the sites for the introduction of Western music. Western classical music arrived in the Meiji period as sheet music. But it took recording technology in the Taisho era to bring such music to the urban public. In the cabaret-style environments of Café Lion and Café Tiger, there was live music, usually in the form of popular Dixieland or other Western music. But later, recordings were played in the jazz kissa of the 1920s. (The combination of the English word jazz with the abbreviated version of kissaten, kissa, became the term most commonly used for these places.) Later, as jazz of more esoteric varieties became popular in jazz kissa, music more seriously engaged customers than it had the flapper and lounge-lizard audiences who danced, chattered, and drank over

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the music of their cabarets.27 The famous live jazz café of Shinbashi, the Duet, was opened later, in 1931, setting the Shinbashi-Ginza area as a jazz venue. There you could order coffee for 15 sen—rather pricey, but there was live music there. The jazz age was of course much more than jazz—as coffee was the aroma and taste of the era, so jazz became “the sound track of modern life.” 28 It connoted a new set of social values, mores, fashions, gender relations, and consumer interests. And behind all of that were the political and economic volatilities of a time when nothing seemed the same. The transformation of material culture into modan seikatsu was accomplished as much in kissaten as anywhere—where the middle-class customer, literary intellectuals, and aesthetes met, expanded their tastes, or took refuge.29 While jazz arrived as a captivatingly foreign cultural form, the newly shaped Japanese urbanity readily embraced it as Japanese, along with novel clothing, foods, and coffee, configured as local and urbane at the tables of the jazz kissa.30 The jazz that was later to infuse the smoky air of the café first came to Japan by passenger ships that hired Filipino musicians. These musicians often took up work in Japan at hotels and ballrooms in Kobe, a major passenger port, or in Yokohama, also a key port with good access to Tokyo. Jazz musicians from Japan heard the music themselves on shipboard: Ida Ichiro, a pioneer in Japanese jazz, had learned in San Francisco. On his return to Japan, he joined the Takarazuka Revue orchestra, playing for the all-female theatrical troupe near Osaka, and attempted to introduce jazz in the intermissions, to the disdain of other musicians. His band, the Laughing Stars, was founded in 1923 but was short-lived. At the end of the 1920s, with rising governmental control and mistrust of foreign influences, jazz and dance music were seen as dangerous to public morality, and clubs were shut down. When in 1926 and 1927 dance halls were shut down in Osaka, some were transformed into cafés, where the police were less vigilant. At the same time, in the late 1920s, when the laws were temporarily lifted in Tokyo, dance halls were built on the Osaka model, while in Osaka jazz cafés, playing imported jazz records became popular. It seems that in this regard Tokyo was a step behind. The jazz-record kissaten in the early postwar years were places where musicians could study and notate the sounds. By the late 1950s, Japanese jazz had been recorded and was offered in cafés, but American jazz continued to be treated with the highest reverence. Jazz in Japan is now centered in Osaka, Kobe, and Yokohama; aficiona 

 

 

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dos go there on pilgrimage to festivals and clubs such as the Chigusa in Yokohama, where a nostalgic reverence for the past is maintained. Yokohama today is branded as “Jazz Hometown Japan” and has an annual Jazz Promenade festival at which both Japanese and foreign jazz musicians perform. In today’s jazz kissa, music is the purpose of one’s visit, not socializing. In Yamatoya, a jazz kissaten in Kyoto, coffee is served and jazz recordings chosen by the master are played all day and into the evening. Most customers come alone, and those who come singly or in pairs— there are never larger groups—sit listening and staring into the middle distance. The first time I went to Yamatoya, I arrived with a young Japanese friend who was also new to the place. We had an over-lively conversation, looking up only toward the end of our stay to note that our discussion had been viewed rather darkly by the master, even though there were no other customers. The jazz was the point. In jazz kissa, as opposed to jazz clubs or nightclubs, alcohol was rarely served until the late 1970s. Jazz, seen as an “intellectual music,” as we have seen, was best heard under the influence of coffee’s “dry inebriation” (kawaita meitei), while blues or dance music might well be accompanied by the “wetness” of alcoholic intoxication (shimetta meitei). There are cafés for other music. The early postwar utagoe, precursors to today’s karaoke bars, were cafés usually featuring a musician who might play a guitar and sing, sometimes along with customers. In these small shops the walls were hung with musical instruments that customers might also use for impromptu performances, and while music was appreciated, talent was not demanded and genial acceptance was the rule. Utagoe kissaten were often associated with leftist movements, and songs were often anti-establishment, antiwar songs. There are a few such singalong cafés left in Tokyo, notably Tomoshibi in Shinjuku and one bar-café devoted to Russian revolutionary songs. There were also ongaku kissa, where live or recorded music of no fixed genre might entertain customers, and dansu kissa, replacing the older “tea dance” salons. As respite from entertainment of any kind there was the muongaku, “no-music” café, where you could count on a quiet place. Jazz kissa and other listening cafés did not belong in the noisier category of cabaret, which derived from the Café Lion and Café Tiger waitress cafés; rather, these places, both entertaining and relaxing, focused on the appreciation of music. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, most homes did not have record players of good quality, and the meikyoku kissa (classical music cafés)  

 

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F igu r e 7. Ryugetsudo classical music café with stuffed animals. Photograph by Kondo Minoru.

could provide nearly concert-hall conditions for listening to classical music. The meikyoku kissa (literally, “important” or “famous” music cafés) were indeed serious—and the remaining ones are now sites of memory and musical piety. In the 1950s, most people still had little in the way of home entertainment, and the meikyoku kissa provided a small luxury in hard times. With a cup of coffee, one could sit for hours listening to great music recorded in Europe, America, or Japan, in a room with fine acoustics. One such café, the Ryugetsudo in Kyoto, continues today virtually unchanged since the 1950s. When I visit, as I do regularly, I walk up a narrow staircase on the side of a two-story building in the northern part of Kyoto, near the Demachiyanagi station where trains depart for mountain destinations. If I arrive with companions, we are welcomed by a staff member in the anteroom with “Will you be silent or will you be talking?” The correct answer of course is that we will be silent, but there is courtesy for the sociable, who are ushered into a small glass- and mirror-lined “talking” room with dark wood furnishings and elaborate decorations that would have fitted in the most baroque Viennese sitting room. But we certainly have not come to talk, and so we are quietly ushered into another room, the size of a small ballroom, with arched  

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ceilings and rows of upholstered chairs and sofas, all facing a front area of gargantuan speakers and open space. The sound fills the room. The setting is concert, the mood comfortable but sober. I choose a sofa or a chair, a corner or the center, and the waitress, walking very quietly in felt-bottomed shoes on parquet floors and oriental carpets, takes my order as I point: one does not vocalize one’s request. If I have bought a pastry from the bakery downstairs, I will have removed its paper wrapper in the anteroom as instructed, so as not to make crinkling paper noises during the “concert.” Some tables have notes on them such as “Here you may not write”—some permit smoking. The coffee too must be quiet: it arrives in a cup on a soft leather mat, no saucer, and I am given a soft wooden spoon for stirring, no clinking, no clanking. No doubt someone else has ordered music to be played, but quietly I consult the large Dickensian ledger listing the collection and enter my choice in another book on a table with a small green-shaded lamp. One can station oneself in the “request seat” and wait for a staff member to notice and take one’s music order verbally, in a whisper. The walls are lined with cases holding the more than eight thousand long-playing record albums the café owns. When one’s number comes up, the staff person finds the album and plays it for everyone’s enjoyment. To create a more perfect acoustic environment, there are large stuffed animals— teddy bears, polar bears, rabbits, and dogs—sitting here and there on chairs. Older men especially seem interested in taking one to their seats to sit beside (or keep on their laps: is this a waitress substitute?) to provide a sound buffer for good listening in what might also be seen as an unashamed mildly regressive interlude. The owner, Chin Souichi, inherited the café from his father, Chin Houfuku, who founded it in 1954; he is still there, often playing his violin in the bakery below. In his seventies he started to go blind, and as his sight failed he wanted to enhance another of his senses, so he learned to play the violin. He has the same kodawari or dedication for his practice of the violin as he instilled in the listening environment upstairs and in the customers who must conform to his expectations for music appreciation.  

 

 

Politics and Coffee: Growing Suppression of Public Spaces Coffee can stimulate more than musical and aesthetic senses; unlike alcohol, which might dull action, coffee might make political hearts beat

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faster. Cafés in Japan were not immune from suspicion at times of perceived threat to authority. While Marxists and Trotskyites, anarchists and other subversives made cafés their homes, so too did Japan’s feminists find space to meet in cafés, from the early suffragettes to the later women’s liberation movement. The early feminist leaders were usually upper-middle-class women of cosmopolitan backgrounds who found a natural home in the new coffee and pastry shops—or Western tea parlors—places where educated women might gather. By day, such shops were safe resorts for those who needed a space of public propriety for their intellectual and social subversion. The Law on Public Assembly and Association of 1890 forbade women’s presence in public political meetings. By 1922, however, an amendment to this law loosened some of the restrictions on women’s attendance, though the law was not completely rescinded. In 1925, criticism of the kokutai, or national “essence,” was proscribed in the Public Peace Maintenance Law (Chian Ijiho, finally abolished in 1945). The law was enforced at the will of officials at the height of the new café movement. “Foreign-influenced” artists and writers found it wise to change their cafés of choice frequently. Women’s movement leaders used Ginza cafés—especially those of a “feminine” nature, with pastries and Western tea—as meeting locations for small groups of women, in part because using their homes might conflate their radical activities with their domestic responsibilities, and even the most ardent of change seekers did not want to put their families at risk. In spite of restrictions and growing suppression, the enlargement of Japan’s empire in the 1930s significantly increased the variety of cafés, and public culture in general, as the exotic qualities of the colonies were represented in shops where the waitresses and waiters wore Koreanor Chinese-inspired costumes, and where memorabilia and artifacts decorated spaces as signifiers of colonial power. Today, an Indonesianthemed café with waitresses in sarongs has much of the same flavor, though it evokes a former Dutch, rather than Japanese, rule. Today’s “ethnic” (esunikku) cafés reflect some of the orientalism of these cafés. By the middle of the 1930s, political activity in cafés had substantially shut down, as had suspect artistic and intellectual expression there. The Peace Preservation Law was more strictly enforced as the military buildup and incursions in China demanded solidarity behind the kokutai. Cafés as off-duty sites, as places where respite from the official could be found, and where the luxury of coffee was on offer, were less tolerated at a time when universal mobilization in service to an official policy of  

 

 

 

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stringent austerities demanded public adherence and any demonstration of laxness was suspect. Coffee itself began to be scarce, and imports stopped altogether in 1938. Late in the war, no coffee was available at all, and coffeehouses served “substitute coffee” (daiyoo koohii) made from nuts, soybeans, grains, and leaves roasted to produce a dark brown brew. In the dark days toward the end of the war, people came to cafés as refuges, as places where others would show up, as places warmer than home when it was cold, and as places where, in the most difficult times when food was scarce, something warming was available. Of little nutritional value, a hot beverage—even hot water—could still be encouraging, and it was only when a café had nothing at all, not even a rice cracker, to serve with the “coffee” that it would shut down. The coffee warehoused by Germans in Yokohama before the war had been sealed in godowns, but toward the end of the war the seals were broken and the coffee distributed to the army—like all food supplies, coffee was in service to the war effort. The World Coffee Company created packages for army, navy, and air force coffees—some now offered in the same “nostalgic” packaging at the Yasukuni Shrine gift shop. After the war, it was easy to open a café rather quickly, because the café didn’t serve food and thus was not hindered by the food shortages or by stringent licensing for food establishments. By 1949, cafés serving coffee for 30 to 50 yen flourished. Cafés in this era were places of community and solace in the first years of reconstruction. Cafés were also places for those with scant social life—poor students, men and women who’d lost family in the war, workers who had suffocatingly small abodes to return to in the evening. One man, reminiscing about his youth in the coffeehouses he frequented in the early postwar period, had perhaps odd romantic memories of these places: “They stank of stale cigarettes and smelly feet,” he said. Former Marxist youth who sang Russian revolutionary songs in the utagoe, recaptured in reunions of the veterans of the student movement fifty years on, might invoke their formerly smelly feet in nostalgia. There were other cafés devoted to other movements. In one café, Three Points, oddly located on the Ginza over a pizza restaurant, women gathered in the late 1970s to read and discuss feminist works, most in translation, such as the writings of Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan. Less strident sounds are heard in the red-velvet-seated cafés evoking imperial Vienna, and retired railroad workers decorate theirs with memorabilia of the old Japan National Railroad, but historical and per 

 

 

 

 

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sonal memories are not the only evocations of the malleable places we have assembled here as “cafés.” As sites of memory, as convening spaces and demonstrations of taste, cafés in Japan are very diverse. In the postrevolutionary period of the 1980s after the heat of social movements, including feminist initiatives, had died down, the “no-pantsu” kissa featured waitresses walking over a mirrored floor wearing “no pants” under their skirts. And in another retreat from the movement’s goals, when anti–sexual harassment laws were passed in the mid 1980s, there were reactionary sekuhara cafés where waitresses wore abbreviated, provocative office uniforms, enticing ogling and touching by male customers; they advertised “What you can no longer do at the office you can do here.” The importance of diversity in café culture cannot be overstated. While predictability, comfort, and a kind of nesting make cafés popular hangouts, the possibilities for novelty engage customers too. There may be then a paradox in the nature of the chain coffeehouse: it offers predictability in its standardization, but it cannot offer protean possibility. To be a known place does not mean anonymous uniformity; on the contrary, it means to be a specific place with known services, people, and locale. The chain store may imitate spaces of comfort and gemütlichkeit with sofas, indirect lighting, and small living-roomlike corners of sociability, but if it is replicated everywhere, it has no particularity. Not the least of the sources of diversity is the marked personality of a place, often that of a finicky and friendly maestro owner whose focus determines the customer’s experience. In the next chapter we will meet some of the hardworking makers of congenial spaces and nigh unto perfect coffee.  

Chapter 4

Masters of Their Universes Performing Perfection

I am successful in my café if my customers know that every cup of coffee I make will be made by my hand with my kodawari. This will make them comfortable here. My feet hurt, but I will never sit down if there is a customer in the shop; I have to serve people. — Café master, Kyoto, April 2006

The master looks around to be sure no customer is present and lifts his pant leg to the knee. The purplish web of bulging varicose veins speaks his pain. Why this café owner and coffee connoisseur reveals his suffering to me is not to make me feel sorry for him or see him as a hero, but rather to prove that he does the job right, in his terms. Not every good master has his measure of success, and he would prefer not to have such wounds incurred in service to it. Kodawari, the desired quality of focus and perfection-seeking, is a constant goal for makers of coffee—and fine craftsmen in any art in Japan. What he calls his kodawari is dedication to his work, comprising service, skill in making coffee, and an uncompromising sense of the importance of what he does. Perfection is in the person, not in the cup: the “master” is an embodiment of the desire for the ultimate coffee experience. And the key in such specialty shops is this person for whom the English word master—in Japanese, maasutaa—is used. Sensei, the word for “teacher,” is customarily used in traditional crafts and arts, as well as in schools, to mean “the person who has gone before” in experience and learning. But in Japan a new word was needed to describe the owner of a café who is responsible for everything the shop is and what he provides to a customer, so different, and so constantly evolving, is coffee practice.  

 

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F igu r e 8. Hanafusa in Kyoto; the master making siphon coffee. Photograph by Kondo Minoru.

The quality of the coffee, the ambience and service, everything is in the hands of the master, whose authority is secondary to his “affectionate” obligation to the clientele. While he may not make every cup of coffee himself, his skills must be consummate: he is a model whose presence inspires emulation. The master is a teacher as well as a performer of this virtuous act. Some have called the master “a perfect Confucian.” Being a person in charge, at the apex of control and decision making, is to be a person committed to service and obligations to others. The moral order is embodied in the person of authority who must not let down those whom he serves. Being a nurturant, generative, but uncompromising teacher involves taking care of others. In this reading, the master is servant to his customers, his staff, and the coffee itself. In one sense the traditions are upheld: the disciples in such a café are to copy first, then innovate only when they have succeeded—the usual trajectory in craft-learning in Japan. That concern—touching on all details in the business—is encapsulated in the word kodawari, which is translated variously as “fastidiousness,” “a personal passion to pursue something,” “disciplined dedication,” or “obsession” with something.1 Kodawari is embedded in the thing produced—it is not only in the attitude or practice of the maker  

 

 

 

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but is consumed by the recipients or buyers of the goods themselves. Architecture is often cited as good “if you can feel the kodawari of the person who designed the space.” 2 The word kodawari can be attached to something made, to gloves or watches or pastry, to the products of organic agriculture, and most especially to anything handmade. It can be what is conventionally termed “art,” but it can be in any endeavor a value-adding practice. At an exalted level, a traditional item, made by a traditional craftsperson, will almost automatically have kodawari. The members of one Japanese family have exported their kodawari to the small town of Winchcombe in England, where they make perfect cream teas for afternoon visitors in a three-hundred-year-old house, winning the 2008 Top Tea Place Award. This extension of skill and service to another tradition shows its malleability—as we will see in the case of coffee in Japan as well. Kodawari is good business. You can charge more for an item with kodawari, and the word is used even for mass-produced goods sold in convenience stores, if they are top-of-the-line. A bartender’s shaping of the perfect ball of ice for a drink contains kodawari, even though the ice ball is destined to melt away soon in the glass of a customer for whom it was made. The attention to detail is not for its own sake: it is part of a densely constructed relationship based on trust and responsibility among all levels of provision, production, and consumption. Coffeemaking, like so many practices, is both art and craft in Japan, and the master behind the counter is producer, craftsman, and artist all at once. It would be easy to view kodawari as an exotic obsessiveness, part of a national character that shapes Japanese craftsmanship and attitudes about work in general. In fact, many non-Japanese see Japanese as pathologically engaged in perfectionism. We see Asian classical musicians engaged with perfecting their technique on their instruments and think that it is their “Asian” single-mindedness or at least the effect of committed “Asian parenting” that makes them so successful; if they were American or Brazilian virtuosi, would we see them as overdoing it? Perhaps we have decided, as Steven Reed notes, that a Japanese tendency to focus on detail is a cultural trait and cannot entertain the possibility that cultural acts can be rational, commonsense ones.3 Americans commonly believe that among Asian practitioners technical superiority outweighs what we would value as “soul” in the performance, but Japanese coffee makers themselves note that one must love what one does to do it well. In a 2004 advertisement for All Nippon Airlines in an American mag 

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azine, the copy reads, “Attention to detail isn’t written in our training manual. It’s in our DNA,” catering to stereotypes about Japanese perfectionism. Using cultural shorthand like this, even if it is an explanation that Japanese people use themselves, obviously essentializes people, process, and product. The effort to create perfection is not Japanese alone, of course: think of a baseball pitcher practicing endlessly, a winemaker testing the mash with care. Takeo Doi, a famous psychoanalyst, noted in his study of amae—a word requiring a stretch to find an English equivalent, roughly translated as “positively valued dependency”—that it is not such an exotic term after all.4 Just as we can value some kinds of dependency even in our insistence on individualism, we can recognize that kodawari taps into some shared ideas about work and value that at first appear to us “genetically” Japanese. To some degree, attention to detail and what we call perfectionism are part of craft training—anywhere. But there is a built-in underlying principle of learning in Japan that puts a different spin on this exercise: you cannot actually achieve perfection, you can only strive for it. The high standard then is not a production model but an ideal about process and effort. Children are not encouraged to think, “I’ve done my best,” but rather to work constantly to improve. There is no ceiling on achievement in this model. Perfection is aspirational rather than attainable. One “performs perfection” as an act of diligence and a sign of value. In Japanese foodways as well, the practice is both routine—practice makes perfect—and exceptional, as people who work in food, at least nonindustrial food, see their product as an aesthetic performance and an act of displayed diligence.5 At a more down-to-earth level, however, kodawari can be consumed: the word is used in advertising—the “discerning” shopper will choose our goods—and in manufacturing, as in “made with kodawari.” To some it sounds fusty and old-fashioned. A Japanese hip-hop rapper might say, “Sonna ni kodawaranai,” meaning “I’m not that fussy,” about his performance. But a cartoonist preparing manga comic books will be proud of his effort and say, “E ni kodawaru”—“I pay attention to my drawing”— or, possibly, “I am really into my drawing.” 6 To an American eye, a practice of kodawari that might lead to varicose veins may seem irrational, bordering on the obsessive. In other settings it may just seem overly time consuming: a teacher in a school attempts to engage children in study by learning every child’s personality and performance ability and visiting their homes; in a taxicab, a driver keeps his white gloves meticulously clean.7  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Like the word dedication in English, kodawari describes correct attitude but does not demand perfect performance. As one respondent said, “I may not be so careful about everything, but at least I know how it feels to be devoted to something.” 8 And as another said, “I have a few things in which I have kodawari: I make my own curry spice mixtures from scratch and I drive a stick shift automobile, which gives me a sense of mastery through kodawari.” 9 In a novel by Yuka Murayama, Delicious Coffee Series, a coffee master passes on the secret of good coffee-making to a younger man, demonstrating that the older man now accepts the younger as a fully mature person. The writer says, “Tasty coffee cannot be made only with technique. It requires sympathy and care toward those who drink it. It also requires a firm sense of self on the part of the server.” 10 It is not, however, selfless dedication: on the contrary, giving to others is both relinquishing one’s self and fulfilling that self, however tired one’s legs become. At the counter of an independent café, the master demonstrates his keen concern for the customer in detail and in actions; writ large in corporate policy, this demonstration must be more abstract. The ideology of kodawari is invoked for the public face of a company in its stated values of sincerity, trust, and sensitivity to the customer. Within the company, management may preach kodawari to employees, expecting this quality in their work and promising in exchange kodawari in its labor practices. In the coffee shop, however, there is a “non-bureaucratized devotion” that is spoken and practiced at counter level.11 This devotion, an aspect of mutual responsibility in Confucian hierarchy, is practiced in the personal space between maker and consumer that includes both economic transaction and trust in what might be called, following Aviad Raz, an “affectionate enterprise.” The link between customer and master in a café relates to the wider cultural repertory of teacher-student and parent-child relationships in which there is an exchange: for dependency and total reliance on the teacher, parent, or master, the child, student, or customer receives the products of responsibility and devotion. The customer signs on for this relationship by entering the space of the master. The customer trusts the master and the master must provide the best there is in service and taste in the cup of coffee. In turn, the customer must be wholeheartedly ready to learn his role in the perfect cup—as Sekiguchi Ichiro, the master of Tokyo’s Café de l’Ambre, most stridently insists—and in exchange he will receive the master’s best.  

 

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The High Priest of Coffee-making Sekiguchi Ichiro founded Café de l’Ambre (Kafe do Ramburu) in Tokyo’s Shinbashi district in 1948. This café is a temple of connoisseurship and its bar the altar on which a priest-barman performs the rites. The process may seem to the uninitiated excessively fetishistic. This demonstration of standards, virtues, and skills in coffee might appear to be derived from the rites of the tea ceremony. While Sekiguchi, a magisterial standard-bearer for coffee, hates the tea ceremony, saying it emphasizes form over flavor, others say he himself creates such a ritual in his “way of coffee.” The process and performance may overwhelm the experience of the product, but the goal of coffee-making, whatever formula is used, is the service, he says, of a perfect cup to a guest. What one sees at Café de l’Ambre is a distillation of historically developed cultural norms of taste, as well as the idiosyncrasies of a particular personality. Sekiguchi may well be the most demanding in the training and performance of his staff, the quality of his beans, and his expectations for similar standards in his clientele. As is said of some sushi chefs, Sekiguchi has no compunctions about evicting customers who do not understand or who resist his authority. Now in his late nineties, he is in the shop, in a tiny closet of an office, every day, overseeing the beans, the roasting, the water, the shape of the cup. Sekiguchi says he works scientifically: he notes that each transformation of the beans contains many variables that must be controlled. The roaster must prepare the coffee in small batches, screening the beans to remove all imperfections or missized beans so as to be able to control the roasting. Grinding the beans should be done cup by cup, so that there is no loss of aroma and freshness. Good coffee is also about timing. The preparer brings to a boil fresh cold water only in the amount needed for one cup. His best-trained customers know to call a day before arriving, to have a particular bean roasted, say, a 1992 Yemen or a 2000 Ethiopian, so that when they arrive to have a cup, the beans will have “recovered from the shock of roasting.” While the water is coming to a boil, the beans are ground—only what is needed for one service. A flannel strainer (called a nel bag) holds the ground beans as hot water, cooled down from boiling so as not to extract a bitter taste, is drizzled in several rounds over the coffee. The spout of the pot has been pinched “like a crane’s beak” so that only a very thin stream of water can be poured over the grounds. The “crown”—a mound of grounds—  

 

 

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appears and sinks as hot water is again dripped slowly, eventually creating the perfect cup. The cup too is important: he feels that the edge of the cup should be thin so that the customer can sip a small amount at a time, and that the cup should be handleless so that the customer’s hands wrap around it. Japanese coffee of this kind is obviously a little cooler in temperature than American coffee, which is dripped or pressed from much hotter water, so a handleless cup can be quite comfortably warm but not hot. Sekiguchi serves it without accompaniments; if you ask for sugar or milk after you receive the cup you may be denied them or even asked to leave. If you had wanted them you should have asked while ordering, because the coffee is made for drinking a certain way: he would make it stronger or hotter, or with a different bean, if sugar or milk were needed. One senses that these additives are actually a test: you shouldn’t want them, and the coffee shouldn’t need them. There is no food on offer. If you want food, Sekiguchi says, go to a restaurant. One feature of Sekiguchi’s connoisseurship is old beans, stored green sometimes for decades in special climate-controlled rooms like cheese caves. Knowing what bean and vintage to order is a skill expected of his clients, but blends are not scorned. Sekiguchi says that a master is known for his blends; single-bean roasts play only one note, but a blend is a symphony. Sekiguchi has his critics. To some he is a coffeemaniakku—a fetishistic, obsessive “maniac” eccentric, a dictatorial connoisseur. He is paradoxically inconsistent: in the shop, the roasted beans are kept in glass mason jars on a shelf above the burners, where heat and light may harm the taste. Experts say the beans are poorly sourced and roasted, that the beans’ origin is not always what it is said to be, and if you break open one of his roasted beans, it is not uniformly colored. In Japan, the field has become contentious, and professionals set the bar high. One coffee consultant, Maruo Shuzo, says that the master needs to respect the drinker, who uses all his senses: you hear the grinding, hear the water drizzling, smell the aroma, see the color and depth, taste the several stages of flavor as the liquid hits all parts of the mouth, and finally experience the trail down the throat and the aftertaste (nodogoshi). As we have seen, coffee rituals—though shared by many—are not scriptural. There are no “schools of coffee” in which ancient traditions are passed down through disciples. Coffee consumption is broad-based, unlike the practices of matcha or tea-ceremony tea. It is also fast-moving. The iemoto system in which a traditional master—in painting, pottery, martial arts, tea ceremony, or traditional gardening—uses his author 

 

 

 

 

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ity to guide the future of the discipline or craft is ultimately too rigid to accommodate the speed of change and innovation in coffee. In Japan’s specialty coffee industry, kodawari is a required part of the commodity: the coffee industry depends on the same kind of trust up and down the chain as the customer should feel in the cup of coffee she is served at a good café. Sekiguchi has what one coffee specialist called shujin no kigurai, the “pride of the master.” This pride may accompany some quirky coffee-making tactics that run counter to most people’s coffee habits. Among his strategies is the tactic of serving the coffee lukewarm. Most Americans want their coffee too hot, he says, to enjoy the flavor; as the coffee cools, more nuance comes out in the taste.12 It is not only the coffee that must receive the attention of the shop owner; the total experience of the customer reflects on the master’s professional capacities, which are not relaxed in the presence of a regular customer or personal friend. There is no distinction between the personal and the professional in a master’s life.

Bear Pond: Bringing Espresso to Perfection Katsuyuki Tanaka is an old hand at coffee but new to the Tokyo coffee scene. He worked for about eighteen years in New York and other parts of America, consulting on coffee beans and techniques, before he returned to Japan to open his own shops. He makes, unusually for Japan, exclusively espresso. As one customer observed, he makes “caffeinated voodoo.” The two shops, one in a quiet but trendy bohemian neighborhood, Shimo-kitazawa, and the other in bustling central Shibuya, are destinations for coffee lovers who want, in spite of specialists’ traditional avoidance of machine-made coffees, the godly effusions of Katsu’s all-but-handmade espresso. Katsu and his wife, Chisa, are minimalists with maximal drive and determination. The shops are sparely decorated, the Shimo-kitazawa one in cast-off furniture, only one table, a rickety counter against a wall, and plain wood floors. It is cool without trying. Katsu takes notes on everything, observes carefully each roast to see how best to use it. He says that the best espresso is drawn from beans roasted between five and ten days previously, and the temperature and pressure for a shot will be calibrated to conform to the condition of the beans. While he has developed his own seemingly untransferrable pull, he notes with some concern for its imprecision that every shot will always be different—mystically, he offers, “The faith is the bean; the espresso is its destiny.” This is not a  

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man seeking disciples or a trademark performance; people come only for coffee made with his hand and recently, on a cold winter day, the line was out the door. However, he will not make espresso when the shop is crowded; he and the coffee need space, he says, to pull a good shot. In New York Katsu worked for a number of companies unrelated to coffee before working in coffee itself. He was a regular at some serious places, such as Ninth Street Espresso and Gimme. He practiced, took courses, and attended cuppings organized by Counter Culture Coffee, a North Carolina–based roaster. Recognized as a fine taster, he was much in demand as a consultant. “A barista has to understand each variety, where it came from, everything, and understand how to change it. The most important [thing] is passion. Continuing the passion, believing in yourself, is most important. But most people are only focused for a couple of years: lots of education, but after that, no passion.” 13 Machine-made or not, Katsu’s espresso demonstrates that kodawari can be seen in the fine-tuning of handwork even with mechanical interventions. Starbucks is push-button to him; when he manages the controls of his machine, the coffee is as personal as anything Noda at Otafuku can make.  

Owning the Space: Cafés from the Other Side of the Counter Kissaten management attracts a variety of proprietors, just as the café attracts a variety of customers. For many now, especially those for whom mainstream work life has lost its capacity to motivate, kissaten ownership looks good, however risky or romantic. Many cafés opened in the 1970s or 1980s were created by people for whom other more mainstream lives were neither viable nor attractive. Some former student revolutionaries, disappointed in the results of their activism, chose to run cafés as alternatives to a career as a suit and to re-create the spaces where they found like-minded others. Others were simply too independent to work in corporate environments. As one café commentator said, sometimes the owners are kiza—odd and affected—and are clearly not fit for any other work. Some create costumes or manners expressing a somewhat potted idiosyncratic nature: a café owner might wear a beret, or sport a goatee, or wear a collarless shirt and Birkenstock sandals, walking advertisements for the brand of “individualism” in their place of business. If you own a place suited to such non-“normal” behavior,  

 

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your quirkiness is a confirmation of the café’s identity. Your guests, however, might not be eccentric themselves: some kiza cafés attract touristic visits, just like their counterparts in Greenwich Village. Some owners have gained star status as salon-keepers, centers of their political, artistic, or intellectual coteries. No longer just a trade, café management has become a profession with status: indeed, barista has become a desirable job label as it has on the East and West coasts of the United States. It is not usually a profitable profession: a café owner does not expect to make money. Some are run by retired academics who simply moved their student clientele from classroom to café tables. Some are established by widows whose need for society or whose inheritance was insufficient for a more “retiring” middle age. Most ordinary kissaten were created as businesses by people without a specific interest in establishing a coterie or cultural space. And most kissaten are “ordinary”—friendly or neutral spaces with nothing out of the ordinary to see or hear. In the 1980s, recently retired couples started cafés together as fufu (­husband-wife) projects. These cafés seem to be social circles for those whose children have grown up and left, places for them to continue to nurture others. These become ordinary local cafés, attractive for their very lack of definition in space or clientele to those who want simply a place to go that is apart from their work or home. While an emphasis on the quality of the coffee, on service and the relationship with a customer, does indeed produce a harmonious experience in most Japanese cafés, there are places that fail, sometimes through no apparent fault of the owner. The business is not without its wrongdoers and slackers: when you see four or five cafés in a two-block area, you know that some must be doing better than others and the word gets around. In my role as observer-friend-customer with several owners I heard dark stories of competitive sabotage, of cannibalizing someone’s customer base, and occasionally catty remarks about other shopkeepers’ bad practices. Underselling one’s competitors, however, usually doesn’t work: the café experience seems to favor the high-priced brews, the tab acting as evidence of quality. In a coffeehouse management course I attended in Kyoto, aimed at aspiring café owners, I learned how detailed and multiple the roles of coffeehouse owners can be. The curriculum included classes in financial management, menu choices, food preparation, customer service, and coffee-making. In the latter, the agenda included a most painstaking approach to the various methods of grinding and making coffee, including the well-known (in Japan) siphon method. My experience in coffee 

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making led me to assume I could acquit myself honorably in making coffee, even in this way very new to me. But my siphon, inexpertly sealed, exploded: I let my team down, and I “failed siphon,” as my report noted. I emerged much humbler than I had begun; though I felt wholehearted, I lacked the precision my devotion was meant to create. Although effort helps, kodawari cannot be taught: you bring it with you to the task. One woman said, “You have to work hard at paying attention.” I had joined the program as a student in order to find answers to the question, Why do you want to run a café? The most frequent response was, “Because it is my dream.” As the candidates were put through a three-month course, they began to ask questions that revealed more hardnosed concerns: “How long will it be before my investment in facilities begins to pay off?” was typical. The dream aspect, however, reveals several social themes. One is the desire for a project engaging the husband and wife as a team, in an “affectionate enterprise.” The second is the increasing number of young retired—people in their late fifties or early sixties. These people seek active work lives after retirement, whether it be a hobbylike life after their primary work has ended or an economic investment. It is often these “young-retired” cafés that entertain the older elderly, both for private relaxation and as de facto social centers. The population called elderly is increasingly diverse—diverse in age, among other things, increasingly independent, and increasingly in need of such social spaces as homes become more private, neighborhoods less communal, and families more centrifugal. The wave of such cafés that opened in the 1980s is now ebbing as the older owners now face another stage of retirement, but there are more recent generations of “retired” people to take their places and many more older people seeking to sit in them. Besides the café described at the beginning of this chapter, we have already seen Sekiguchi Ichiro’s café, the Café de l’Ambre in Tokyo, as an example of a master’s escalating—and rigidly narrowing—coffee perfectionism. In Bear Pond, we have seen the master’s break-through skills in espresso-making, which seem impossible to teach others. Some other examples of cafés will demonstrate other qualities in the relationship between owner and coffeehouse, and in the universes in which they focus their skills and personalities.  

 

 

 

Tsuta: Nurturing Generations Koyama Taiji of Tsuta café in Minami-Aoyama in Tokyo says the coffee shop is not his business; it is his life, and he expects that it will be where

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he dies. Like the samurai hero in Chushingura, he says, he wants to die in a state of fulfilled commitment.14 He has been behind the counter here for twenty-two years and has no intention of quitting. Tsuta is housed in a long, elegant room with a dark wood counter and a few tables next to a floor-to-ceiling window through which customers can gaze at a small Japanese garden. The ivy-covered house (tsuta means “ivy”) is approached through a gate and up a short walkway. You are entering a “private” space in which Koyama will be your host. His attention to detail, his fastidiousness and care for the place, his sense of kodawari are driven by his love of kissaten. The keyword for his attitude toward his customers, he says, is tanoshimu—enjoy—and the space he provides is dedicated to that outcome. Koyama graduated from the Architecture Department of Nihon Dai­ gaku, Japan University, the largest private university in Japan, hoping to be an architect. In college and in his work life as a director at a large company after college, going to kissaten was his favorite activity. Trained by Sekiguchi Ichiro of Café de l’Ambre, he opened Tsuta to provide for others what kissaten had given him. Tsuta helped him combine his vocation and his occupation: his interest in architecture was driven by an interest in social public spaces, and he designed the café as a space apart, an ambience for friendship. To be healthy, Koyama says, he must have no divisions in his life—splitting his time between private and public, work and pleasure is no good. For him, the kissaten is everything: it contains his physical person, his work, and a community. He says it won’t work if he is less than whole here—he must be honest, responsible, and respectful of others or his reputation will be at risk. One reason that it is not a “business” in the usual sense, he says, is that he doesn’t earn much. What is important for him is that while he doesn’t own the shop—he rents the space—he owns his work there. He arrives at 9:00 a.m. each day but Sunday and opens at 10:00, closing at 10:00 p.m., a twelve-hour shift. He grabs something to eat behind the counter, at no particular time. Before he arrives at the shop, he stops at a different kissaten each day to have coffee—and on Sundays, his days off, he goes to kissaten farther away. This is not, he says, for business or “research” purposes, but just because he “purely” loves kissaten—“It is my hobby.” The work is physically demanding. He is exhausted at 10:00 p.m. He has communicated with people all day long. He has met his customers’ expectations for consistent experiences: they want the place and their coffee to be predictable, and to have him there when they come,  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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ready to serve them. The consistency extends beyond the current cohort of clients. He has generations of customers: “If a young woman from Aoyama Gakuen [the women’s college across the street] comes here when she is twenty, soon she may bring a young man, they may marry and have a child whom she’ll bring to meet me. The child grows up and comes on her own, and then has children of her own and they come too.” He says the café has many such “grandchildren.” Koyama is perfectly happy. He says that if he didn’t love the work the café would not survive. If he ran a bar, he says, he would make more money, but here he is a “master,” the center of a community he has made. He thinks it succeeds because he doesn’t think of it as a business and when he’s in financial trouble, he knows without telling them that his customers will pitch in, and they will order another cup of coffee to support him. His own son could not complete his university education (though he entered easily because of his sports talents) because of his father’s debts, but has a good company job in any case. Although they never discuss it, Koyama hopes his son will take over the business and the son seems to be prepared to do that, even though, as Koyama says, no one gets rich running a café. The economics of this café might be unusual, as Koyama is independent of the large coffee companies. His is called a “direct management shop.” Many cafés are either franchise operations, chain stores, or in some cases sponsored by coffee distributors that provide complete kits of goods to those starting up in exchange for a contract obligating the store to buy coffee from the company. This sort of agreement results in a kanban relationship by which the shop advertises the source of its coffee—the term kanban referring to the shop signs of the Edo and Meiji period establishments. Koyama has always avoided being “owned” by a big coffee company, which, by selling him its beans and other coffee items, would keep him under its umbrella. But the cost of opening a specialty café like his is so high that the subsidies of such companies look attractive to the person just starting out, he says. On the other hand, many middle-level kissaten in kanban status with such companies as UCC or World Coffee have closed as cheaper coffee chains have drained their the customer pool. That he survived because he chose not to go with a corporate sponsor is one of his satisfactions. Koyama gets his beans from a coffee company owned by a former “big coffee” company man, who left to start a small-scale operation of his own (Akura) so that he could better control the quality of his beans.  

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Koyama has been his friend for more than twenty-five years, longer in fact than he has been in the café, and he trusts him completely. He buys only Brazilian Santos beans, nine or ten 60 kg bags at a time, at a special discount from Akura, which has always specialized in Brazilian coffees, and he roasts them himself. He says that one type of bean is enough; the taste of coffee in any case changes according to the season, the weather, the time of day, and his and his customers’ moods. Few large companies sell green (unroasted) beans to cafés, preferring the cafés to leave roasting to them. But more kissaten have recently decided to roast for themselves, which adds value in both the master’s and the customers’ eyes and supports smaller bean purveyors. Koyama also sells his signature roasts of Akura beans to a few cafés and shops nearby. To extend business through coffee sales, a customer has proposed that Koyama sell the coffee beans by mail through a Web site, and this will enhance the scale and profit of his business, appealing to customers who have visited Tsuta in their college years. The name has nostalgic cachet now as he has stayed in place so long, and has become a destination for people outside the neighborhood and university, who come to bask in borrowed nostalgia in Tsuta, now featured in lifestyle and coffee magazines. Even if you or your mother did not dream at these seats as a college student, Hanako magazine, a trend and shopping guide for young women, among others, assures you that you can enjoy the languor of that mood. With a steady clientele (he says he has eight hundred regular customers), Koyama’s average day might earn him 60,000 yen, about $600 in coffee and cake sales. He estimates one hundred cups a day as the maximum he can sell. The standard cup is 600 yen, $6 at the present writing—and the actual cost of the coffee for that cup is 58 yen. He might make 20,000 yen from selling cakes. For a month, then, his sales might amount to 1.5 million yen, about $15,000. With a loyal clientele and no staff to pay he can break even and cover utilities and rent as well. Tsuta is about relaxation—providing the best space to customers for their pleasure, whether social or personal. As a customer said, “If I stay here for two or three hours, reading and talking, that is relaxing entertainment, and I come away with a good feeling. If I order two cups of coffee, or one of coffee and one of tea, that is 1,100 yen—not much for an afternoon’s leisure activity: I have rented space and it’s cheap.” This space is given its identity by the master, as a one-man enterprise. It bears Koyama’s stamp, and without him its future may be uncertain. Hard work and a dream, that is what Koyama wonders if the next gen 

 

 

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eration can sustain. His son, he hopes, can stick it out past the hard times every shop encounters, making the necessary changes, not preserving Koyama’s style but making the café his own. He does not want the place to be a memorial to him.

Personal Orthopraxies Being a “master” is not all about sacrifice. It may be about wanting a community of one’s own, about hoping for some personal popularity, even love, and a bit of applause for one’s hard work. Kodawari may seem like an esoteric Japanese principle, separating the serious from the uncommitted, but at the heart of most masters’ practice is not an austere ritual but commerce—followed by a sincere desire for recognition and a love of coffee itself. Often it is the beverage itself that creates a fan base. At the Café de l’Ambre, Sekiguchi’s technique and assiduous attention to the performance are what might draw his customers. His disciples, former barmen at his coffeehouse as well as those who have learned from them, now have their own coffeehouses with the intent of re-creating a style as well as expressing their own seriousness about coffee. The rituals or orthopraxy—which is what one might call the repetitive behavior and “correctness” of this specialized coffee-making—are demonstrated in the gestures and created in the methods and technical equipment of the art.15 There is no singular right way of making coffee—and no schools, such as divide the practice of the tea ceremony. The way of coffee is an individual’s way of making it, guided by the apparatus itself (the koohii no odoogu, “tools of coffee”). While one shop will use a ceramic pot as the drizzling container for hot water, another will use a white enameled metal pot with a narrow spout, to focus the water as it spirals around the grounds in the filter. Most use cloth filters hung on a wire ring over a small glass coffeepot or held over the cup itself. Another will specialize in the art of the siphon or, occasionally, the French press pot, though this is far less popular in Japan than elsewhere. The shop’s own method and tools are its “brand” as well as a reflection of the personality and skill of the owner. The apparatus of coffee-making has been elaborated in Japan and, as we will see, influences coffee-making overseas as well: “made in Japan” now means the top in coffee goods. In spite of the sophistication of the apparatus created in Japan, Japanese coffee makers prefer the less  

 

 

 

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automated, more hands-on methods. Although, as we have seen, Tanaka at Bear Pond is an espresso star, old-school masters eschew the pull. Espresso machines, one said, deprive the maker of his ability to demonstrate his skills and to affect the coffee taste directly: “You have more influence if it is handmade.” In most specialty coffee places there are no espresso machines.16

Hands-on at Otafuku On Teramachi Street, just south of Shijo-doori in central Kyoto, shoppers fill the neon-flashing electronic goods stores, in a miniature version of Tokyo’s Akihabara. In narrow alleys off the shopping route, small shops offer noodles and there is an occasional small café. A carved wooden sign overhead, in the form of a gently smiling female kabuki mask, points to a small stairway descending from street level to Otafuku, a cozy basement café. A few blocks away, off Kawaramachi street, the archetypal red velvet seating and dark wood tables set the mood of Café Tsukiji, which, in a style evoking the European belle époque, was established in the early 1930s, a favorite of novelist Tanizaki Junichiro and his coterie. The Otafuku café shares this style but is newer, brighter, and more casual. It too has a long history, but it wears that history lightly, without the other’s mood of deliberate preservation. It has all the elements of a nostalgia café without announcing itself as derivative or historically “accurate.” There are anachronistic contemporary paintings on the walls, whimsical toys and photographs. The historical evocations are in the matchboxes, whose design is quite specifically from the early 1920s. The jolly face of the Otafuku, a plump, generous female mask used for traditional dances, sets a pleasant, undemanding tone for the café. Depending on the time of day and the clientele, the small tables and counter are either serenely quiet or jovially conversational. When there is conversation, it often hops tables as young and old customers are encouraged by the barman to join in if it “feels right,” he says. The forty­ ish owner, Noda-san, is dressed in crisp white dress shirt and a long black French waiter’s apron, and he sports long sideburns in what he calls a traditional American look. He is cheerful, positive, with a smiling, confidential manner. His focus is the coffee, but he keeps an eye open for customers’ social satisfactions as well. He makes one cup at a time, boiling fresh water for each service and grinding the beans just before drizzling the water over them. He uses the

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hand-pour filter method, favored in cafés where personalized service is a draw. He pours the boiling water from a kettle into a second pot, and some into the customer’s cup to warm it. After a minute or two of cooling time, he starts pouring the water over the grounds, the filter resting over a small (also preheated) glass pitcher. He starts by dripping the water just a bit over the top of the grounds to heat and moisten them. Then, after a minute’s wait, he begins a tightly controlled swirl, aiming a thin stream of hot water to cover the grounds in a spiral, observing his teacher’s dictum: “Never let the water touch the outer ‘wall’ of coffee or the paper filter itself.” The thin, steady stream forms a spiral first out, then in as he curves his back, holding his arm steady in three stages of pouring. He clearly enjoys having guests watch the water’s balletic performance as it forms a spiral pattern in the filter. Tanaka-san, his mentor, who owns a roaster and coffee-bean shop a bit to the north, says that this is not like the tea ceremony—this is the correct way not because of a kata (proper form), but because this is the way to make good coffee. Noda, with a highly conscious approach to coffee, finds both stimulation and relaxation in making coffee his way. By repetition, he says, one could say he has a way of doing it, seeking perfection, but, he hastens to add, it is not a “ritual.” His coffee, like most in this area, is 400 yen per cup, about four dollars. A cup of specialty Colombian coffee is sold for 500 yen. What counts here is not only the bean—though it must be good—but the craftsmanship. Professionalism in coffee involves the three-way relationship among the master, the customer, and the coffee. Next in Noda’s priorities is service, he says. For him, service means providing the coffee, a warm space, and connections between customers who want to be connected. Some masters, such as Suzuki Yoshio of Café Saza in Tokyo, stress education as service: “The coffee professional should be able to answer to the customer’s needs and to explain the product until the customer is satisfied. The product should merit the explanation—otherwise the professional is nothing but an amateur. Coffee and its stories, that’s what he longs to offer the customer.” 17 After a few years of apprenticeship, the Otafuku owner-master began to serve coffee at the monthly handicraft fair at the Chionji Temple near Kyoto University. This fair assembles artisans and their goods in a motley display of eccentricity and creativity. Noda’s coffee stand there became a focal point, indeed for some people a reason to attend the fair. After about three years, he was encouraged by his fans to start his own shop. His regular customers now cluster at the bar counter or wait on  

 

 

 

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F igu r e 9. Noda-san preparing hand-pour coffee at Otafuku in Kyoto. Photograph by Kondo Minoru.

the stairs outside the door for spaces. His supporters began their own Web site centered on his café. Fan clubs like this are not uncommon; even Tanaka, his supplier of beans, has a coterie following and shows off albums of photographs of his “club.”

When the Master Is a Woman To this point, we have seen only male coffee masters, and indeed men dominate the field of specialty coffee. Still, there are women who rise to the heights of kodawari—sometimes a particularly gendered version— and who themselves have followings. One such is Sa-chan. Sa-chan (short for Sarasa, her given name), coffee master at Factory Café, pours the hot water over the grounds in a cloth filter held in her left hand, just above a cut-crystal glass, with such intense focus that she cannot smile, acknowledge the presence of anyone in the room, or answer a question. Her meditative composure is perfect, her stance that of an assured professional, perhaps a dancer rather than a coffee master. Sa-chan is the youngest of the masters in our stories, but her presentation is the most focused. Her professionalism is not about decor, the mood of the place, establishing social connections, or providing amenities.  

 

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F igu r e 10. Sa-chan making coffee at Kafekosen (Factory Café) in Kyoto. Photograph by Kondo Minoru.

The room is upstairs in a nondescript three-story building on a business street in Kyoto. There is no sign at street level, only a small logo with “Kafekosen” (a parody of Kanikosen [The Factory Shop], a 1929 proletarian novel by Kobayashi Takiji) written in industrial-artistic letters. In the dark hallway off the sidewalk there are bicycles leaning against the wall. Upstairs there is a chipped white wood-paneled hallway with unmarked doors along it. Inside one is stationed a small Tokyo Fuji coffee roaster and jute bags of coffee. Along one wall is a short shelf of books about coffee. Across the room is a counter against the windows. Between the windows is a large poster of Fidel Castro about to tee off, his golf club lifted for what appears to be a most professional swing. To the left of the counter, bicycles, tires, odd bits of machinery all hang on the walls and from the ceiling over a workbench covered with tools. An oil-stained, bearded hippie-esque man is working on a bike, while at the counter, Sa-chan is discussing coffee with a customer. The customer chooses a coffee by consulting a small wooden menu. On the menu is an inked map of the world with small colored sticker dots showing what coffees, of what body, roast, and provenance are available. There is no food. Today the customer chooses Guatemalan Antigua and Sa-chan ceases all conversation as she attends to the work

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F igu r e 11. Kafekosen in Kyoto. Photograph by Kondo Minoru.

of making his cup. If you come into the shop while she is brewing, there is no greeting. You simply sit and wait your turn. Most women who run cafés are nothing like Sa-chan; they perform roles that seem to mirror other roles in women’s lives, such as mother, service worker, nurse, or confidante, translated and transformed in the space of the café. Indeed, Sa-chan has had her critics, some of whom have felt she was reaching too high, that no woman could ever make coffee with the degree of kodawari that men can develop. But most of her repeat customers are men. She is no one’s disciple and she is not performing a masculine task; for her it is gender-neutral. To customers she seems to be a magisterial priestess of coffee in her own domain. To her, as to Noda, however, making coffee is not a ritual: it is a set of behaviors that leads to the best coffee you can make for someone who is present at the performance. Women, as we have seen, have inhabited the public space of the coffee shop for one hundred years of its history, as waitress, customer, mode-setting fashion plate, artist, writer, and political person, away from society’s prescriptions of gender-appropriate identity. Women as owner-hostesses are also both trendsetters and maintainers of tradition as proprietors of their own establishments. What a woman’s presence

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in a café means to its style and clientele varies. Women as café masters often serve as “wise women,” able to provide a special feminine wisdom with the brew. They may act as guidance counselors and sensitive ears receiving the outpourings of their younger clients or as sympathetic “I’ve been there too” friends to the older ones. They tend to be middleaged or older, and may be widows or daughters who have inherited an independent café. Service to others may appear to be an extension of their family roles but they prefer to think of it as a kind of trained, professional sensitivity, not “merely” domestically maternal but also publicly powerful. A female owner does not necessarily mean a feminine café—in fact, most cafés owned by women have the same sorts of decor as those owned by men, and in many cases the owner has inherited a café from her father. A female kodawari-imbued practice might seek the same perfection that male masters do, but with some differences. While no man would fault Sa-chan’s performance unless he believed that no woman can do what men can do, some female café owners take on a different object for their strivings. Occasionally, for example, as in Junko’s Kitchen, the café banks on femininity as its selling point, and such cafés offer no competition to the masculine varieties. Junko Ienaga, a woman in her early forties, has replaced the small front garden and the one-car parking space of her family’s home with an extension built onto her house in a residential semisuburban neighborhood. It is a bright, unpainted knotty pine–paneled shop, with room for a small counter, four tables, and chairs upholstered in bright animal-figured cotton. There are more bright flowery details: frilled lamps, curtains on tiny windows, and a counter covered in the same animal print sported by the chairs. The menus are handwritten on handmade paper, and illustrated with cartoon drawings. The food served is quite literally homemade, featuring soups and sandwiches, omelets, and rice pilaf. Her coffee is made by the pot, not by the cup. She waits to open the shop until 10:00 a.m., when her children and husband have gone to school and work, so she doesn’t offer a “breakfast set,” but counts on neighborhood customers stopping by for lunch after their shopping or errands. Junko says that her café is an extension of her family and her friendships—to serve friends in her home was her dream, and everyone who comes here is, or becomes, a friend. Behind the shop, in her own home, the stuff and mess of ordinary life thwart her ability to be the “perfect” homemaker, but in the café she can offer that feminine perfection to her guests.  

 

 

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The “feminine perfect” is what she displays on her upbeat, lightdrenched, primary-colored stage, which provides the experience of domesticity without its sticky familial aspects. She closes the store when her daughter returns from her juku (after-school tutoring class) so she can help her mother clean up the café; her son comes in later, as dinner is about to go on the home table. Junko says the situation is perfect: if there is a gap between customers she can prepare dinner ahead or do the laundry, ducking back into the café if the bells hanging from its door alert her to a guest’s arrival. Junko’s projection of an idealized domestic role onto the public or semipublic sphere is very different from Kazuko’s sense of herself in her café. Kazuko wanted complete separation from her family responsibilities, a chance to close the door on home, leaving her mother-in-law (happily on both sides) in charge. Her café, Chautara (a Nepali word for a place to rest one’s burden), expresses a completely different side of herself: it is a folk-art-themed space with goods on sale as well as coffee and snacks. She imports small items from Nepal, Indonesia, and Thailand, little woven bags, slippers, scarves, mostly goods appealing to young women. Her menu, chalked on thin wooden boards, has a daily special such as “beef rendang,” a Malay dish; Thai-style salads; and an array of panini, toasted sandwiches. The coffee is organic, and she offers single-bean coffees from Brazil and Guatemala, as well as a blend of her own. This café is near a university, but the prices are a bit high for most students (a set lunch is 900 yen, about $9.00); her regular customers are faculty and staff. Like Junko, she offers only lunch but stays open until 5:00 p.m., which gets her home just in time to help serve dinner with her mother-in-law. Her job there is to clean up afterward and prepare school lunchboxes for the next day. Kazuko began this café with a former classmate from her women’s college; they both felt a café would allow them something beyond their domestic duties. They are both married to eldest sons, which entails having resident mothers-in-law in their cases willing to take responsibility for the care of the home. They close on weekends; the campus is quiet anyway, and they want time with their children when they are home. A fourth female café owner, Shiowaza Yukito, is a widow, now in her eighties, who runs a café near a river on a small side street in Ochanomizu in Tokyo. This is a university area, where she caters to customers with an interest in art. She had a friend, an architect, remodel the front of her house as a café after her husband died. She had university art students make reproductions of modern European artists’ work since she

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could not afford originals, and thus offered the students some arubaito (part-time work) while attracting them and their friends to the café. This art-gallery café became popular, and her presence as the definer of its literal coffee and aesthetic artistic tastes was part of the draw. As the café prospered she began to buy original lithographs by Miró, Dalí, and Chagall. She became, she says, like a curator and patron of the arts for the young, and as they grew up, some opened galleries or became successful artists, bringing more customers. She says, “I didn’t think of getting rich . . . what I feel now, after long years of serving the customers, is that if you serve them with your utmost sincerity they will never let you down.” She says her survival in the neighborhood after other cafés closed was ensured by this sincerity: “We always searched with sincere dedication (kodawari o motta) for the real thing.” 18 The essence of the experience of these devoted café owners and masters is their desire to provide personal hospitality in a public social space, to add an identity to what otherwise might be faceless service, and to stand behind the quality of their brews. Their performances are styled by this desire but not routinized: they do not simply push buttons, and they are not elevator ladies whose memorized speech and trained “service” voices provide predictable guidance. Nor are they polished barmen whose host manners protect them from risky or casual relationships with guests. They are not adepts in tea ceremony, whose rituals seem irrelevant, irrational, and unnecessary. They are also far from the young staff of chain-store establishments whose job involves pushing buttons and ringing up sales and whose tenure as counter help is short. These makers of coffee aim at perfection but know it is always just out of reach. Admittedly, the kodawari coffee people are not ordinary, but neither are they marginal: their coffee culture is fast becoming worldclass, Seattle-beating at home and an object of imitation overseas. What is normal and ordinary about their work is its hospitality in the provision of an expected cup of coffee; what is becoming Japan-in-the-world about their work, a globally spread local cultural form, is its excellence.

Chapter 5

Japan’s Liquid Power

Jaime van Schyndel practices Japanese coffee at Barismo in Arlington, Massachusetts. He is intrigued with Japanese roasting methods, with the meticulousness of “polishing” the beans down to a singular flavor. He says that what people call “finickiness” is tied to real quality, a quality he attempts in his own roasting. The technology of coffee in Japan, he says, engages the hand and mind skills of the maker, rather than giving priority to automation and standardization. He has two roasting machines modeled after the Japanese Fuji Royal roaster, made and customized for him in Taiwan. Coffee gear from Japan—including home siphon systems, drip coffee makers, and cloth filters—fill the shelves in the front of the shop, which is half coffee-geek heaven, half old-world craft studio. In method and presentation he and this shop could be in Japan. Japanese coffee at the high end is now branded to mean the best in quality, techniques, and technologies. Japanese-made coffee equipment is now sold overseas by coffeehouses and individuals; the appearance of such devices now demonstrates their seriousness in coffee. It is not just Japanese equipment. Coffee-making rituals are practices taken to extremes, removed by this excess from the original practical goal of making a good cup of coffee; one exasperated American reviewer noted as he tried to produce the effect, “There was so much serial water heating, filter soaking, blooming and pausing—and so many concentric circles—that I felt chained to the kitchen counter, less coffee server than coffee slave.” 1 One café, the Blue Bottle in San Francisco (named for Kolshitsky’s 1683  

 

 

 

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F igu r e 12. Coffee apparatus. Photograph by the author.

Vienna coffeehouse), has purchased Hario and Ueshima Coffee equipment including siphons and slow-filter sets and sells a product it calls “Kyoto Iced Coffee.” This coffee is made in a dramatic set of glass tubes through which room-temperature water drips slowly, for hours, through a filter containing coffee into a glass holding flask underneath. The device, created in Japan, is now sold to some select American coffee shops for more than twenty-five thousand dollars. One coffee shop owner in Cali­ fornia said, “It lends a nice Japanese appearance to the store”—a statement that to most of his customers, not yet in on the cachet, makes no sense.2 It appears now that new trends in America might well come from Japanese coffee, rather than the other way around. Japanese coffee? That phrase in itself is unexpected to those who assume coffee drinkers in Japan are influenced by American practices,  

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tastes, and trends. Japan’s coffee consumption long antedated the Seattle arrivals. Coffee in Japan has been on a steady trajectory from its first acceptance in the 1600s to today’s three-cafés-on-a-block density. The Japanese coffee industry reveals surprises in itself and has features unique in the world of coffee. One of these has to do with the paths it took in getting to Japan and the routes coffee took after it became “Japanese.” Not only did coffee come to Japan by a route not followed by major European coffee-consuming countries, its modern global spread was in fact precipitated by Japan’s nineteenth-century engagement in coffee imports. Coffee as the first truly globalized commodity began with Arab traders and Turkish envoys, but was developed and opened to the wider world by Japanese. Coffee, as I have suggested, represents Japan’s engagement with the world, in its complexity and contradictions, as commodity and as beverage. Coffee, as one observer said in the 1930s (ironically, at the point when Japan was leaning toward isolation), might have given Japan its entrée into the world of modern nations. Modernity in this sense was driven not by politics but by economic and geographical concerns, as a newly mobile labor force went where the jobs were, to Brazil, and later, as individual entrepreneurs created the trade links that moved the beans and built their fortunes. Coffee in Japan displays a mode of cultural organization that is also on view in the adoption of other novel commodities and ideas. In Japan a new item or idea might with time and consumer interest quickly become fully naturalized as Japanese. An example might be the case of ramen noodles, originally a Chinese import, whose cultural “flavor” became assimilated with only a slight “chinoiserie” accompaniment as a fillip of borrowed culture. Jazz became Japanese in the 1930s; mayonnaise was absorbed as a “home” taste soon after the war. And while many Japanese aficionados of the tango take a pilgrimage trip to Buenos Aires, the dance itself has joined the repertory of hobby specialties at home, as with the hula’s popularity—and transformations—in Japan. In the case of consumable items, in Japan the pattern is to add rather than to replace, leading to great diversification of goods and to the creation of multiple niches in consumption. Similar to but faster than Western music, clothing, or architecture, coffee took a seat (but on a Western chair rather than a floor cushion) as Japanese and didn’t budge. The cultural organization that facilitated its localization or naturalization lay in the spaces coffee created, which did not compete with or duplicate the spaces that existed prior to the period of modernization.  

 

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The cultural organization that lies behind this phenomenon is a porous frame of sensibilities and predispositions. Japan may appear to be a hidebound, defended traditional society, but once the wall of custom is breached there is little resistance to novelty. This does not mean wanton receptivity: there are present and active filters of taste and shapers of behavior that act upon the novelty to bring a cup of coffee and a scone into line with local understandings of practice, taste, and quality. Some of these understandings include notions of service, such as the custom of presenting a hot or cold wet towel before table service of coffee; some include the ideas behind “handcrafting” in a handmade cup of coffee. Neither the product itself nor its environment need represent “tradition,” however, as culture itself is subject to social change and the influences of geography and history, the economy and the market. While the cup of coffee in the hand of a turn-of-the-twentieth-century gentleman is possibly made with the same bean from Brazil as that in the turn-ofthe-twenty-first-century cup, there is a century of cultural change in the consumer and the place where he consumes it. In its travels, coffee has taken on local meaning, sloughing off the cultures of its origins and fitting into, or creating, new local tastes and practices. When it came to Japan, as we will see, it fitted several preexisting niches and became the means for the creation of new ones. It is commonly thought that Japan is a receiving country rather than an originator of products and ideas, which may indeed be adapted and improved when they arrive. Such scholars as Harumi Befu have suggested that Japanese-generated goods and ideas have now been disseminated to most of the world.3 These products are not all Japan-flavored; many are mukokuseki, without national cultural specificity. Manga comics, Hello Kitty dolls, and anime films carry “Japan” with them to some degree, but other products such as some electronics goods are not encultured in that way.4 In the case of coffee, we see Japan as an early global entrepreneur, an active initiator of production and taste standards in a trade and culture often thought of as European. Japanese coffee ways now contribute to global taste trends and technology as both definitively local and strongly global through the branding of Japan’s own coffee culture. One aspect of the Japanese coffee “brand” is its demanding high standards, so high that samples of coffees from new sources are sent to Japan to be vetted before entering other markets. As an ironic turnaround from the days of Brazil’s taste export, Japan provides a value-adding dimension to any new coffee bean. Whether esoteric or ordinary, the coffee in a Japanese kissaten is the

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core proposition of “drinking in public.” Japanese coffee is now at the meeting point of world systems and local tastes, and is influenced by changing geopolitical technological, agricultural, and geographical realities. Drought, an infestation of beetle borer, a change in the price of diesel fuel, or flooding on a transport river will imperil Japanese coffee-drinking patterns. The temporary halt in imports from Ethiopia in 2006, caused by pesticides found in jute bags containing coffee, caused deep concern as the Yirgacheffe and especially the Mokka beans had just won a big following in Japan. As Japan bought 20 percent of the Ethiopian crop annually (third after Germany and Saudi Arabia in purchasing Ethiopian coffees), refusal to buy the beans became a political issue; and thanks to investments helping Ethiopian coffee producers to ensure Japanese standards, in April 2010 exports to Japan began again. As in all such cases, Japanese experts say, “It is a matter of rebuilding trust.” With issues like these, some larger roasting companies in Japan prefer to manage their own plantations and to diversify their sources.

The Industry of Taste: Bunmei Kaika in a Cup In the Meiji period, the program of bunmei kaika (civilization and enlightenment) gave priority to Western technical and organizational products as a springboard from which Japan’s economy and status in the wider world might “rise up and prosper.” 5 The nation was put on a curriculum of becoming “civilized.” Imports of coffee from Brazil in the 1890s were welcomed by young cosmopolites who demonstrated their urbanity by drinking “modern” and “European” coffee. At this time coffee drinkers were still a limited group of Westernizing elites and young salaried workers of upper-middle-class background. By shortly after the turn of the twentieth century, however, coffee had become a well-known, almost “normal” beverage. Although some complained that young people had forgotten the taste of Japanese tea and had taken on “Brazilian” tastes, coffee and its places rapidly became part of the ordinary life of many people. Coffee’s consumption in Japan, however, antedated the Westernizing trends of the Meiji period by at least 170 years. The preconditions for coffee’s successful development in Japan were some lucky accidents of history. Stories of shipwrecked Japanese sailors taken aboard foreign ships and given coffee to restore themselves begin in the 1600s, as do stories of foreign boats drifting to Japan: both brought coffee to Japan. One account from 1841 by a sailor taken aboard a Spanish ship noted,

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“Kind people came and served us all a tea-like drink with sugar in it, called ‘koohii.’ ” 6 The arrival of coffee in Japan with missionaries and traders is noted in diaries of both foreigners and Japanese. Portuguese and Spanish traders, before they were expelled from Japan in 1639, drank coffee, which Japanese observers then called the drink of the “red-haired” foreigners. It was consumed by few Japanese, mostly as a medicine. Trade with the West was maintained on Deshima Island near the city of Nagasaki in the sakoku jidai (closed country period). This small island was the window to the West in this era, constructed to house foreign traders and other visitors who could cross to the main island only by special permission. Only a few Japanese were permitted to visit the island, mostly translators and merchants as well as prostitutes. By 1601 the Japanese had concluded an exclusive trade agreement with the Vereenigde OostIndiesche Compagnie, the Dutch East India Company. The French soon arrived, having created their own trading company in 1664, but by then the Dutch had a near-monopoly, which they held until 1853. The French were relatively early in the coffee trade: about the time that coffee reached Vienna from Venice with a young officer who fought against the Turks, a French Orientalist, Jean de Thévenot, arrived in Marseilles from Istanbul with several hundred sacks of Yemen Mokka beans.7 Coffee became a significant source of income for the Dutch as a trading commodity, when seed from Malabar went into colonial production in Batavia as the Dutch began to develop varieties themselves. In 1690 the first shipments of coffee arrived on Deshima from Dutch trade routes from the Middle East through India and from a Dutch plantation established in Ceylon. Coffee appears as early as 1705, in the diaries of the opperhoofd (chief manager), where it was reported that coffee was drunk at a dinner offered by Japanese to the kapitan (head of mission). The first time coffee was actively traded in Japan was in 1724. Shortly after this we see requests to the Dutch to send coffee beans to the lord of Satsuma and evidence of high-level interest in coffee.8 In interviews ordered by the shogun Yoshimune held in 1725 with the kapitan of the company, the interviewer, Katsuragawa Hoshu, asked about tea drunk by Dutch people. The response was, “We have no sencha or bancha, but we do have karacha,” which was taken to mean coffee.9 In 1775 a young Swedish doctor, Carl Peter Thumberg, arrived in Nagasaki to work as a doctor for the Deshima colony. He wrote of the postprandial coffee habit of the Dutch there, and of the Japanese who began to try it. His translator, writing for Japanese about the habits of the Dutch, notes,

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“Kohii—it is habitually drunk by the Hollanders; its shape is that of a pea or soybean but it is from a tree. They grind it, put it into hot water, wait for a while and add sugar and drink it. Kohii is like tea for us.” 10 Rangakusha (Dutch studies scholars) helped to promote coffee as they translated medical and botanical texts from Dutch, leading Japanese doctors to prescribe coffee, as Western people did, to strengthen appetite, cure headaches and “women’s diseases,” and stop diarrhea. They noted that Dutch people “drink it in the morning and evening. It energizes your mentality. If you take it before and after breakfast and lunch, it also helps digestion.” 11 Japanese doctors practicing “Dutch” medicine reported on its beneficial aspects, not all of which, including “leading to repose and sleep,” were those reported in the Dutch literature.12 This association with medicinal uses would persist until the early nineteenth century, though Japanese closer to the Dutch traders drank coffee for pleasure. By 1797, it was a prized commodity. In Nagasaki municipal records there is a list of gifts given to prostitutes in that year from the “red-haired people.” On this list are candles, soap, tobacco pipes, salt, chocolate, and coffee beans in a small iron box. The prostitutes of Nagasaki favored coffee: their Deshima clients introduced it to them sweetened with honey, and the women saw its stimulant properties as useful for their work. They needed to stay awake to be sure that customers would not steal from them. Like the translators, prostitutes were cultural intermediaries and became disseminators of the taste for coffee. On June 19, 1797, coffee was also a sacred offering to the gods. “Kohie” was formally presented as a ritual gift to the priests of Dazaifu Ten­mangu Shrine in Kyushu, one of the holiest Shinto shrines in Japan. A merchant, Ide Youemon, son-in-law of the daimyo Matsudaira, arranged the gift, having had the experience of drinking coffee with other merchants in Nagasaki. This presentation represented an early entrepreneurial interest in coffee and demonstrated its value as a gift to the gods, that by means of the authority of spiritual channels it might find customers and profits for Ide himself. The first post-Deshima Western account of coffee in Japan is in the writings of Philipp Franz von Siebold (1796–1866), a medical doctor who became a scientific collector and writer and who traveled to Java and Japan with Dutch trading officials in 1823. Von Siebold was permitted to teach medicine and to visit Japanese patients. On his first trip von Siebold reported that Japanese found its taste appallingly bitter, reminiscent of various “Chinese” medicines. It was found effective in  

 

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treating a wide range of symptoms, especially stomach ailments. Coffee was said to provide a salutary “heating” of the body in diseases where “cold” distorted the system. Von Siebold also noted that Japanese who had overindulged in coffee used umeboshi, pickled plum, as an antidote—and, presumably, a cooling influence.13 Von Siebold hoped to propagate the idea in Japan that coffee promoted a healthy long life and proposed to import beans himself. Von Siebold suggested to the Dutch East India Company, “Send several thousand pounds of coffee to Japan annually. You have to roast it, grind it, and put it in a nice can or jar. Write detailed instructions on how to cook and drink it, and stick that paper onto the container.” 14 In his thoughtful market research, however, he noted that “there are two major hindrances in importing coffee products and we have to be careful about this. First, Japanese people naturally dislike milk. Second is the roasting in which they have no experience. Japanese people think that to drink milk is against Buddhist commandments. For them, milk is ‘white blood.’ To drink white blood is a sin. . . . So they cannot appreciate the value of this drink which the Dutch people praise.” Siebold was right: not everyone enjoyed its taste. Oota Shokuzan (also called Oota Nambo) reported in 1804 that he had had coffee at the Nagasaki magistrate’s office: “I had something called ‘kahii’—something to do with powdered roasted beans . . . it tastes burned. I can’t stand its taste.” 15 While the Tokugawa bakufu sponsored coffee’s dissemination, sending it to local lords such as Tsugaru-han in Hirosaki in 1857 as gifts, popularity of coffee among nonelites gave officials pause. As a pleasurable drink, coffee in the hands of commoners began to worry those concerned with the inroads foreign culture could make, if uncontrolled, on Japan’s cultural integrity. At the same time the bakufu decided that its popularity might benefit the state, and created an import tax on coffee in 1866. Japan’s cultural coherence in the face of foreign influences was promoted with a strategy of simultaneous preservation and engagement— wakon yosai (Eastern spirit, Western goods), which involved the adoption of the foreign along with the preservation of Japanese culture. As Japanese officials, scholars, and other elites began to travel overseas in the 1860s, their experiences of coffee were part of the learning of “civilization” (meaning Western) and “modernity.” Coffee brought these messages even to the countryside in Japan, where koohiito, a ball of sugar with ground coffee in its core, dissolved in hot water and drunk, was offered to children as a treat. Another version of this, satogashi, coffee  

 

 

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powder mixed with sugar and pressed for eating or dissolving in hot water, was popular in Osaka, and, as one writer noted, was the means for merchants to deliver to rural Kansai farmers “the taste of bunmei kaika.” 16 With the rush of interest in foreign material goods, ideas, and technology in the more open climate of the Meiji period, officials exhorted citizens to eat beef and follow it up with coffee as a digestive. Beef, like coffee, was mostly consumed at first under the guise of “medicine,” but samurai, against the Buddhist rules, ate it for strength.17 Coffee, like beef, had a niche in the cultural menu as a “manly” substance. It was at this point in coffee’s history in Japan that Tei Ei-kei opened his coffeehouse, Kachiichakan. While the earliest influences of coffee drinking in Japan were Euro­ pean, Japanese imbibers soon found as they traveled that they were sipping to a different beat than their English or French counterparts. In the 1910s, as artists and writers from Japan became habitués in cafés in Europe, their taste for coffee had to be adjusted to local practices. Whipped cream, for example, was not used in Japan as a topping for coffee until Japanese returnees from Vienna asked for “Kaffe Wien” in Japan. Quite a different tone was set by the coffee itself and its cultural roots in Brazil. As we saw in chapter 1, it was the Japanese connection to Brazil early in both coffee production and customs of consumption that made both prosper.

The Brazilian Connection Markets and tastes for coffee proliferated far from its points of propagation. Coffee in most high-volume coffee-drinking countries is an import; the only producing country also to consume heavily is Brazil. In Brazil, it was the Dutch and Portuguese who brought beans for cultivation, as indeed it was the Portuguese missionaries and traders who introduced Brazilian coffee to Japan. Coffee had arrived in Brazil in 1727 from Yemen by way of the Netherlands, and thence to France and its colonies in Martinique and Guiana.18 Beans were under the strict control of colonial regimes (Dutch and French among others) hoping to gain monopolies over coffee production. There were severe penalties, sometimes death, for the smuggling or unauthorized conveyance of coffee trees and beans. The first workers on Brazilian coffee plantations were indigenous Indians; they were susceptible to imported diseases and were replaced

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by African slaves, who were also at work in mines and sugar plantations. When the coffee industry went into a slump at the end of the 1880s, Brazil turned to contract immigrants from Japan and Europe to grow coffee. In 1887, the owners and operators of plantations, the fazen­ deiros, collectively created the Society for the Promotion of Immigration, ensuring that “sponsored” immigrants from Europe and Japan arrived at no cost to themselves. Mizuno Ryu, Japan’s first “coffee czar,” acted as a labor agent delivering Japanese workers to the fazendas in Brazil. Called in Brazil the “hero of immigration” for skillfully managing labor imports, Mizuno created the world’s first coffee-shop chain in Japan in the early twentieth century. Mizuno went to Brazil in 1906, crossing the Andes on foot, and proceeded to work with the Japanese Embassy in Brazil to promote coffee. Mizuno worked with both the Brazilian and Japanese governments to create new legislation to support immigration and emigration. São Paulo agreed to support three thousand immigrants over three years as a first, promotional essay in transnational labor. Mizuno and other agents recruited younger brothers in Japanese rural families. Eldest sons were usually designated heirs, but younger sons were “free” labor in the sense that as noninheritors they would need to find their livelihoods outside the family. On April 28, 1908, the Kasato Maru sailed from Kobe carrying 781 men and women as contractual labor migrants to Santos, Brazil. They arrived on June 18 to serve in the newly developed plantations. On their arrival, on a Brazilian holiday, the Japanese saw a display of fireworks in the harbor and imagined that the fireworks were a tribute to them. The Brazilians astounded the Japanese, and the emotion was mutual: apparently, on inspection of the ship the Japanese had just left, Brazilians were surprised at how clean the kitchen, bunkrooms, and bathrooms were. The Japanese were not to find similar conditions at the fazendas where they would work. The labor conditions were generally very poor, close to those of slavery.19 Contractual agricultural laborers were seen as temporary and all but disposable; their welfare was not the concern of their employers. Many ran away from their contracts within six months of arrival, and many died from malaria and infections and from the lack of medical attention. But workers kept arriving; another significant group arrived after the great Kanto earthquake of 1923, workers bringing their families displaced by the loss of homes and businesses. Immigrant ships continued to leave Kobe up to 1941 and emigration continued after the war until the last ship to Brazil sailed from Yokohama in 1973. Later

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migrations were smaller, usually family members going to join much earlier arrivals, and generally workers traveled by plane. From 1887, when 18 tonnes arrived free of charge in Japan, coffee imports steadily increased. The export of coffee had grown gradually from the late eighteenth century, when 480 bags of coffee left Santos in 1797, to more than a million in the mid nineteenth century. In 1905, when a crisis of overproduction forced Brazil to store beans in warehouses as the price dropped, the government reached out to Japan as a promising market. In 1902 a shipment of 60 tonnes had been sent, followed soon after by 76 tonnes in 1907, and by 1912 the record shows a delivery of 84 tonnes. By the 1920s, with the rise of Japanese café culture, demand for Brazilian beans reached high levels. In 1936, when there were eighteen thousand cafés in Japan, imports were up to almost 3,500 tonnes. Brazil is now the source of much of the coffee drunk in Japan, which receives 24.9 percent of the Brazilian crop, while Germany and the United States together account for 49 percent.20 As Keiko Yamanaka reports, about 35,000 Japanese, most from southwestern Japan where recruitment was concentrated, entered Brazil between 1908 and 1924.21 In 1925 the Japanese government increased incentives in a national policy to promote emigration to Brazil, and during the period 1925 to 1934, 120,000 went, 41 percent of them female. Until 1941 there was a steady increment of workers who completed their contracts, bought their own land, and began to farm rice and coffee. After the war, emigration continued until 1973. The factor pushing population out of Japan was economic change. There were failed harvests but also a new kind of economic issue for Japan: returned soldiers from overseas wars. At the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Japan fought two wars, the First Sino-Japanese War in 1894–1895 and the Russo-Japanese War in 1904– 1905. At their conclusions, Japan’s labor force needed to absorb thousands of returning troops. Many marginal workers were at risk, providing a pool of workers for migration. On the pull side, Brazilian coffee plantations needed workers. In 1885, African slaves in Brazil were liberated. A decade later, when the Friendship Trade and Navigation Treaty was signed in Paris, Japan was encouraged to fill the gap left by the abolition of slavery. Japanese workers were particularly sought after, as they were said to be “clean, patient and orderly.” 22 The successful among the first generation of Japanese coffee workers who survived the difficult conditions were able to buy their way out of their contracts and bought land for themselves within a very few years  

 

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of their arrival.23 In 1913 the Yamaguchi brothers created the Asahi Plantation, and while they may not have been the first Japanese immigrants to do so, historians note this year as the beginning of Japanese production in Brazil.24 By 1923, Japanese-owned plantations in Brazil had 25 million coffee trees, increasing to 60 million in 1932, only twenty-four years after the first immigration. By this time, there were at least six thousand Japanese landowners, each on average nurturing ten thousand coffee trees.25 The workers brought agricultural zeal and entrepreneurial modernization to the coffee industry.26 Just as Tei Ei-kei has been established as the pioneer in Japan’s coffeehouse history, so has Mizuno Ryu attained fame when, after leading thousands of Japanese workers to the Brazilian coffee plantations, he became president of the Imperial Colonial Company of Japan in Brazil. He cornered all aspects of the trade, establishing a chain of almost fifty coffeehouses in Japan, which would receive the promotional donations of coffee from Brazil.27 With the injunction to “spread coffee in Japan,” Mizuno’s Café Paulista chain (named for São Paulo) was established.28 Coffee’s success in Japan was engineered not by Western but by Japa­ nese energies, one of the several surprises in the stories of Japanese cafés and coffee. Mizuno’s dynamism was reflected in others who acted as entrepreneurs for the Japanese market, often becoming managers of fazendas and export companies. It has been suggested that without Japanese in Brazil at this crucial time, Brazil’s coffee industry would have taken much longer to develop. And without Brazil’s initiative in Japan, Japan’s independence from the coffee conduits of Western powers would have taken much longer, if it had occurred at all. The only period to show a downturn in the consumption of coffee in Japan was the period of increasing isolation, rationing, and scarcity toward the end of World War II. Stores left by German coffee traders who used Japan as an entrepôt for their coffee bean purchases in South­ east Asia were broken into and consumed in the early 1940s, but for the most part, cafés scrambled to find coffee substitutes as whatever coffee was available was given to the military. An older coffee industry official noted that coffee in wartime became more of an idea than a substance, and a place rather than a drink, but so important was it to people’s sense of comfort that a sip of hot, weakly brewed substitute was enough to remember better times. During the 1960s, as full recovery led to an economic boom, Japanese

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coffee once again took off, and cafés and coffee drinking became even more a normal part of urban Japanese life. The “cultural organization” of coffee had fully developed, producing a daily routine, a symbol of urbanity, and an industrial pattern that were firmly implanted in Japan. The distinctive industrial development of Japanese coffee further sets it apart from its Western counterparts.

Trust in the Coffee Industry: The Three Highs If more evidence is needed of the profound differences between coffee in Japan and in the West, it can be found in the structure, strategies, and logic of the coffee industry itself. Maruo Shuzo has described several features of the coffee industry unique to Japan, and of interest in the larger world of coffee production and distribution. The Japanese coffee market has begun to some degree to shape the world’s specialty coffee landscape, as it did coffee’s mass market much earlier. Such a singular industry bears study, both for its “Japanese” characteristics and for the ways in which an integrated industrial system has been constructed. The primary aspects of the coffee industry that set Japan apart from much of the rest of the coffee world include the involvement of the sogoshosha (trading company). Trading company strategies involve a system of vertical integration in which all levels of production, importation, and marketing are centrally managed by a single company. “Central management” is not sufficient to describe the relationships among the operational layers of coffee production. Integration usually proceeds forward, from production to market, but in the case of Japan’s coffee industry, according to Robert Lawrence, it proceeds “backward,” from point of sale to a consumer to sales to the domestic market back to the offshore growing and harvesting of the coffee beans.29 By moving with the product from sale in the cup to point of origin, we can observe the workings of what I would call “managed predictability” along the supply chain. Cafés and kissaten often have arrangements with coffee companies that ally them in various ways all the way back to the coffee growers. There are three main ways this relationship is managed, two more common than the last. A supplier of beans will negotiate with the owner of a café for the exclusive right to sell beans to the shop in exchange for setup, equipment, and supplies down to cups and saucers. This makes the café part of the coffee company’s sphere, but not as a franchise or direct sales point for the distributor’s coffee. We have seen the kanban

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relationship between shop and supplier in which the shop remains independent in name and operation and may simply display a small version of the logo—its shop sign or kanban—of the distributor somewhere in its window. Another arrangement is franchising, in which an operator buys a branded shop, or is leased one, from the coffee company, within the sphere of management, choices, and authority of the company. The third model of café ownership is completely independent of large suppliers: the café owner chooses beans from smaller roasters, often local, through personal connections and without either the security or the dependency of working with a large organization. The trust a regular customer has in the coffee master is conveyed up the line to the roaster on whom the master depends and to the distributor of beans and the importer—and from there to the consultants, growers, and local overseers in the country of origin, all within a company’s management chain. The system works, however, not because of the structural and economic control in the linkages but because of the implications a long-term relationship has for quality and reliability. Few if any of these connections are legally contractual. The farmer delivers the best possible beans because the quality control in place at each level reaches forward in time and back to original agreements. The secondary elements of the system are also important—the logistics of production and processing are extremely complex and reliant above all on trust. The significance of trust in the coffee industry cannot be overstated. Relationships are mediated without legal or bureaucratic intervention. These noncontractual agreements have enormous power, and the binder is a mutual interest in the quality of the coffee. Japan’s coffee consumption, according to Maruo Shuzo, is governed by the three highs: high quality, high price, and high cost of production. The high quality of specialty coffees in Japan is well known, and much of this is enabled and ensured by the work of coffee experts: the professionals engaged in coffee in Japan rank among the world’s top specialists. High quality in coffee begins with sound trees, well nurtured, with coffee cherries picked at the right time (which means in practice at different times, as they ripen unevenly on the same tree: one attempt to make harvesting more efficient is a program in genetic modification to produce a coffee tree on which all beans ripen at the same time). The process of removing the mucus of the cherry, leaving the bean inside ready for wet or dry fermentation, must also be done with an eye to timing. Beans must then be dried and stored carefully, to avoid developing mold or other damaging effects. Beans must be graded carefully for size  

 

 

 

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and defective beans removed by hand by skilled bean sorters. Storage should be in sacks that allow for evaporation of moisture but prevent insect infestation or other depredations from hurting the beans. The quality must be protected at all stages, and this does not stop with the shipment of beans to the distributor in Japan. Each plantation’s product must be tested and tasted by the pivotal person in this process, the coffee cupper. The life of coffee cuppers is rigorous, dependent on long training and the development of a disciplined intuition. They are trained by experience and extensive travel—mostly to less-developed areas, as coffee grows in zones 25 degrees north to 25 degrees south of the equator. Proud of surviving difficulties, Japanese coffee experts say they envy the lives of wine connoisseurs, whose product grows in temperate, “civilized” areas. And yet they take pride in hardships that, they say, help to focus the palate. Some coffee companies in Japan have a strong sense of connection to the points of origin for their beans. Maruyama Kentaro, the owner of Maruyama Coffee, travels half the year to the plantations that supply his firm. He notes the health of the trees, the appropriateness of the species to the land, and the producer’s attitude. Tsuji Takao, the president of Kyowa Coffee in Kyoto, which advertises itself as a “traditional coffee company,” has created a small coffee orchard outside his plant, in the factory’s parking lot, utilizing what he has learned in many “trips to origin”—not to develop coffee growing in Japan but to understand closer to home the life cycle of a coffee bean. This emphasis on terroir goes beyond the French wine-related idea of soil and climate and extends to the personality of the owner, grower, and producer, as the “human terroir” of coffee. Some companies say that they also vet the café owners to whom they sell beans, as they would not want to sell to people who would mistreat the coffee or have a poor attitude about coffee-making. At the “master” stage of a coffee man’s career, he devises his own blends and best techniques in combination to develop the coffee and his reputation. Some, like Sekiguchi, stop there, but others continue to experiment. Here the coffee professional meets the café professional. Pro­fessional standards are evident in industry publications (there are at least three publishing houses producing several coffee and tea magazines each) offering guidelines, but as one coffee expert in Kyoto said, “A real professional makes his own ways, his own style.” If you simply follow the method of a professional, you are an amateur, he said.  

 

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Slavish imitation is to be eschewed—except when the basic skills are being learned, when repetitive imitation is demanded. The second “high” is pricing, an important feature of the marketing of coffee in Japan. A high price sells; cheap goods are taken to be inferior. Price is trusted as a measure of quality in Japan, and cheaper coffees do not sell to discriminating specialty coffee buyers. Coffee has been incorporated into traditional midsummer and midwinter Japanese gift-giving practices. In department store gift service sections, the largest percentage of gifts is in the category of foods. In the 1960s even ordinary foods, packaged for gift giving by the store, could make a big impact. At the time, beautifully packaged bottles of vegetable oil, juices, and instant coffee were good choices, but in the bubble years of the 1980s, as people had more disposable income and as the demand for more luxurious items kept pace, expensive whiskies, European chocolates, and boxes of rare teas took precedence. Coffee, whole bean and freshly roasted, now makes a high-ranked gift item, but it must be specialty coffee, in decorated tea caddy–shaped tins, packed three to an elegant box and labeled with the provenance of the bean and degree of roast: to the right people, they are the epitome of quality, as long as they are produced in Japanese style and cost the right amount. A gift should not be discounted, as Johnny Walker Black Label whiskey discovered: when the company offered a price reduction, buyers in Japan, accustomed to buying whiskey as a gift, moved up to Chivas Regal instead.30 The recession of the early 1990s and later economic downturns have not led to marked diminution in the sale of high-priced goods at these gift-giving times, though the amounts purchased have declined. Prices of coffee at the source vary by crop and by the cost of shipment and processing. The most expensive come from places where the crop is of high quality, highly in demand in Japan and elsewhere, and local costs of labor and processing are high. Japanese buyers take the top of the crop in Brazil, Colombia, and Indonesia, the countries supplying 60 percent of Japanese coffee. The prices range from $2.46 per kg to $4.24 per kg, from Colombia and Brazil, where there is currently (as of 2008) a consumption boom and a production decline. The price of bagged coffee to the customer in Japan varies, and the highest price is obtained where beans are roasted in-house, at such select shops as the Yanaka in Tokyo or the Inoda in Kyoto. In cafés, 5 percent of shops sell cups of coffee at 650 yen (about $6.50) and up; 25 percent sell cups from 500 yen (about $5.00) and up, and most specialty coffee shops sell coffee at 400 yen (about $4.00) and up (2008 prices). Shops at the  

 

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nether end of the price scale, in cheaper chain stores such as Doutor, begin at 180 yen (about $1.80) per cup.31 The third “high,” the cost of production, is inescapably high in Japan because of rarefied standards, techniques, and sourcing. The logic of production and distribution for Japanese coffee is complex. It is connected to trust, which, as we have seen, contains and protects a system within which quality, price, and distribution can be maintained at a high level. The protection of good-quality beans comes at a high price, a price that is not completely under the control of the Japanese importer. As noted above, the processes and handling of beans are subject to local conditions that are not as predictable as the buyers would have them be. In one case, for example, the sudden rise of fuel prices led farmers in a cooperative in Southeast Asia to scale back on the purchase of fuel to drive the pumps sending water to the trees in the dry season. They did not inform the Japanese buyers with whom they had contracted a sale, and it was only when the beans, now inferior in quality, were harvested and delivered that the Japanese buyers realized what had happened. Having Japanese contractors on the spot was not an option in this new micro-cooperative venture, and the relationship of trust had not developed sufficiently for good communication to prevent this disaster. Under ordinary conditions, the local farmers, with middlemen as educators in the ways of Japanese coffee and buyers’ expectations, would learn how closely they needed to work with their customers. Investing in this relationship is expensive on the buyers’ side, but in Japan economies practiced in coffee are seen to diminish quality, a much higher priority.

Influence and Distortion at the Source Japanese consumption patterns have led the world’s specialty coffee market and developed sources for marketable beans. As we have seen, the Brazilian coffee trade depended at its start both on Japanese immigrant farmers and on the Japanese market for the beans. The Brazilian coffee trade still gets many of its cues for production and much of its specialty coffee trade and pricing from Japan. Brazilian Santos is the current market-leading bean for Japanese buyers. The choice of beans for the Japanese market tends to determine the options for other buyers as well. The standards of the International Coffee Organization have also been affected by Japanese requirements and by Japanese purchasing power. Interest in regional, single-bean coffees—an American trend driven by  

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Star­bucks, say Japanese industry leaders—was presaged by Japanese buyers’ interest in two regional coffees: Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee, buruman in the cafés, and Kona coffee from Hawai‘i are so valued in Japan that the names of these regions themselves have become “brands.” At top prices of 1,300 yen (about $13.00) a cup, these have led the market as quality standard-bearers. But there has been a significant and disturbing distortion in the production and distribution of these specialty coffees. The status of such beans depends on the fact that they come from a particular place. Japanese buyers bank on the provenance of the beans: in Jamaica, Blue Mountain should come from the Blue Mountain itself. The supply of the beans is thus limited, and is further limited by the local strategy of keeping production levels low to maintain the high price of beans. As the demand in Japan has risen, Japanese coffee importer/roaster companies have asked for larger shipments supplied not by increasing the area where “Blue Mountain” can be grown in Jamaica or the amount of coffee produced there, but by bringing Cuban, Haitian, and Dominican beans to Jamaica. These beans are the same varieties, grown throughout Central America and the Caribbean. From Jamaica, the beans—now representing a mixture of locales rather than only beans from the Buruman terroir—are shipped to Japan as Jamaican Blue Mountain at the rate of seventy thousand 60 kg bags per year. In fact, what is marketed as Blue Mountain is usually only 35 percent Jamaica-grown beans. These strategies are of course known elsewhere, but controlling the very top of the specialty ladder is a particularly Japanese device. Japan has cornered the Jamaican coffee export business (and therefore, it is said, the Jamaican economy: as one American adviser said, if the Japanese stop drinking buruman, Jamaica will starve). At this time 93 percent of the Jamaican crop is sold to Japan, and most of that to one company (Ueshima Coffee Company). UCC’s operation typifies a vertical integration scheme: it owns a significant share of the land, subsidizes production, and controls labor costs and shipping, as well as distribution within Japan. UCC can also lock in the price. There is a similar story about Hawaiian Kona coffee imports to Japan, where one company, the same as in the case of buruman, brings Colombian beans to Hawai‘i to supplement the scarcer Kona beans; “pure Kona” contains about 30 percent Colombian beans by the time it arrives in Japan. Japanese coffee consumption is affected by other changes and pressures in the world production system. Before the early 1970s, the unroasted “green” beans were processed in time-consuming ways, and were subject  

 

 

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to disease and pests; but they were, it is said by older roasters, much better. As older varieties have given way to newer, more disease- and pestresistant ones, the quality of the taste has gone down as the predictability of the crop has risen. Roasters say that the beans are more uniform and there are fewer defective beans, but they find that the taste is flatter. Roasting techniques, they say, are changing to accommodate these deficiencies. Rationalizing and streamlining the process of drying and packing has also, they say, led to a decline in taste. In addition, the prized cultivars of the past (such as Bourbon or Typica) have been sidelined and are grown only on small specialty coffee estates in Colombia, Mexico, and Guatemala, while mass production favors the newer, more resistant beans. Even the mass-market roasting companies such as UCC now see the value in small and frequent roasting schedules, in delivery of wellvetted beans—at least for their special cafés, now drawing customers “trained” to look for branded regions such as Kona and Blue Mountain. These customers are also becoming more precise drinkers of coffee, and the shops catering to them talk of body and density too. The world of Japanese coffee has extended well beyond its early Dutch and later Brazilian origins. Japan’s independent sourcing of beans early in its development as a coffee-consuming nation, the creation of a base separate from those of Europe and America, put coffee-drinking there on a novel trajectory, though its early influences were European. We will now look at the divergent influences on taste that continue to change Japa­nese coffee and the places where it is drunk.  

Chapter 6

Making Coffee Japanese Taste in the Contemporary Café

At Lush Life, a small jazz kissaten in Kyoto, the master makes the coffee—only one kind of bean, one cup at a time—while his wife makes the day’s curry. There are few choices. As a guest, you simply receive the dark brew and the dark stew, and relax gratefully as you listen to Brubeck or Miles or Billy Strayhorn—again, for the most part, what the master has chosen. Taste is about trust in such places; you come without demands and none are placed on you. The anxiety of choosing the right thing is notably missing. You have not come to demonstrate your active connoisseurship, only to receive what has been made for you. In such a café, you have chosen to come here, not to make any demands or distinctions. Taste then is the product of an interdependent relationship between maker and consumer. This reciprocity, trust in exchange for quality, works in Japan, even in the context of constant change in coffee production and places. Coffee-making in Japan, up and down the taste ladder from artisanal to industrial, has witnessed several “revolutions.” Some affect coffee habits but meet resistance among some drinkers; others change the way most people drink coffee. Changes in sourcing and production have affected, and indeed created, the high demand for specialty coffees worldwide. Technological change has enabled even ordinary mom-and-pop cafés to offer espresso alongside the slowly hand-dripped filter coffees, and canning has enabled the traveler to have a coffeelike substance almost anywhere and at any time. Electronic equipment has allowed for stan 

 

 

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F igu r e 13. Hanafusa café in Kyoto. Photograph by Kondo Minoru.

dardized, predictable roasting quality, adjusting automatically to the age, moisture, and density of the green beans, to the needs of a blend, and to the tastes of roaster and customer. And yet what has become the trend of choice among coffee lovers in Japan and elsewhere is handmade coffee, or coffee made by a contraption that can elevate the handmade to its apogee of near-perfection. Taste is “handmade,” but tomorrow’s cup may come from a machine that takes the coffee in hand even higher. The rise in consumer taste for good (specialty) coffee has pulled the market up in a symbiotic relationship between the expansion of new coffee sources and the education of coffee drinkers. As we will see, the rise of Japanese standards has created a rise in standards for beans everywhere, at all stages of production. Some trends are not, however, about specialty quality but about convenience, ensuring the ubiquity and ease of coffee drinking. Some trends began elsewhere but were in some way “Japanese.” One example is that of instant coffee, invented in Chicago by a Japanese scientist residing there, Dr. Satoru Kato. It did not become popular in either country until much later, though Kato introduced it in 1901 at the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, and formed the Kato Coffee Company in Chicago that year.1 It advanced to mass production in America in the late 1950s and became popular in Japan in the 1960s,

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when it quickly became a drink for home and office. Instant coffee originally was marketed as “upscale,” with names such as “Imperial” and “President” and glamorous (usually Western) actors employed for commercial advertising. This strategy made homemakers and office ladies feel that they were offering an elite beverage rather than a convenience food, and the “masculine” nature of coffee made it suitable to serve to the largely male office workforce. Vacuum-dried instant coffee (shinkuu kansoohoo) turned to spraydried instant coffee (1966), which gave way to freeze-dried coffee in 1970, making home and office consumption nearly effortless. Conveniencestore sales of coffee products such as bottles of liquid iced coffee have increased, raising the imports of industrial coffee from Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia, where instant coffee powder is much cheaper. Starbucks in 2010 introduced a new instant coffee called Via, which it is currently attempting to market as a convenient (underplaying the word instant) gourmet coffee, but at this writing there is no indication yet of its success among the consumers of specialty coffees in Japan. But in its many forms, coffee is available: there is almost no hindrance or barrier between customer and some form of coffee in Japan. Included in the many ironies of coffee are the contradictions and pendulum swings in taste: as efficiencies make possible the omnipresence of standardized coffee, specialty tastes demand the esoteric, the local, and the particular. These coffees, branded by their exclusivity, are coveted, but as the exotic or rarefied is not always available in a café, the devotee develops a preoccupying hobby. Most homemade coffee is either instant or coffee-machine made, dripped through a filter. The latter coffee, made from ground beans, is called “regular” in the coffee industry. But for those with an interest in creating their own café-style cup by hand, there are more variables to juggle than hot water, filter paper, and grounds. There are choices to be made among beans, by type, region, age, and roast, as well as by fineness of grind, differences between burr grinders and blade grinders. Coffee has become the object of technological geekery in Japan, but with a difference. Technologies in coffee are meant to develop taste, not to promote efficiency: as one coffee expert said, we are in a strange relationship with machines—we want them to do only the work they can do better than we can, not to take the art of coffee-making away from us. The machinery of choice might be a simple nel bag, flannel cloth fitted over a ring to be hung over a pot or cup; a Melitta-style drip top (now made as disposable cardboard and paper devices); or a home version of the siphon,  

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among many options.2 The somewhat retro-fashion siphon coffee, made over a spirit lamp, demands fastidious attention but makes for a nice performance as the water bubbles in the bottom glass sphere and rises up to meet the grounds in the upper one, while the master stirs the brew on top. At a certain moment, when the bottom heat is removed and the vacuum is broken—it is sudden and magical—the coffee rushes through to the bottom glass sphere, and it is done. The cafetière, or French press pot, is less used in Japan than it is overseas. Few people roast beans at home, in part because Japanese homes are small and space and good ventilation are needed for home roasting, but machines are available, usually German or Italian, for this purpose. One colleague does this on his apartment balcony but must warn neighbors to slide their doors shut when he does. Small neighborhood roasting companies have loyal clienteles with exacting specifications. In one such shop, Yanaka Coffee, orders are roasted on the spot, while you wait, or by telephone notice for pickup within fifteen minutes. Those who wait often have a cup of “house” coffee as they smell their own order roasting. One Yanaka coffee customer takes the beans home, lets them rest (from the “shock” of roasting) for twenty-four hours, and then grinds enough for one cup by hand, in a mortar with a pestle, not in an electric grinder. He said that coffee is his source of relaxation, and the physical effort and time taken by hand-grinding it are part of the pleasure. Choice of bean is becoming more complicated as beans from coffee regions such as Cambodia, formerly not accessible to the Japanese market, become available and as ideological, ethical, and taste considerations create new markets for organic, artisanal, and sustainable coffee crops. In 2005, Sumitomo was the first in Japan to import “bird-friendly” coffee beans, through an exclusive agreement with the Smithsonian Institution’s Migratory Bird Center, marketed by Ogawa Coffee in Japan. Coffees branded by locality have more than sales power for the beans; their points of origin are configured like fantasy dream-travel destinations, so that purchasing and drinking coffee becomes a romantic escape. In this there is another irony, one seen in the United States and other coffee-drinking cultures. The local is now globally desirable, and yet part of its cachet is its locality: the foods of the terroir travel, but can the experience travel too? Coffee-drinking, as we have noted, takes place almost always at a distance from production, and coffee is usually grown in places with relatively low standards of living. Add to that the dissonance between consuming an environmentally virtuous, sus 

 

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tainably grown coffee and understanding that it has, by coming to the consumer, burned considerable amounts of carbon fuel, and you have a global quandary in a cup. For the most part, however, the Japanese consumer gives priority to taste and other qualities over the resolution of such dilemmas. As consumption of coffee continues to rise, there are some interesting developments in Japanese coffee. For instance, sales of lower-price coffee beans in bean shops have increased, showing that consumers of specialty coffees are not retreating from their habit of drinking such coffees, but have simply chosen to buy less-prestigious “named” beans, to experiment with lesser-known ones.3

Branding Coffee Tastes Is there a specifically “Japanese” type of coffee? Many consumers think so. “When I am outside Japan, I miss Japanese coffee. It is strange because coffee is everywhere but not to my taste: it has to be Japanese,” said a forty-five-year-old businessman in Tokyo. As a “normal” beverage coffee entered the Japanese diet as it had been drunk by the Dutch, very strong (in terms of density), though brewed from lightly roasted beans. The preference now is for medium roasts, but of course among seriously committed drinkers, the roast is calibrated according to the type, age, and moisture of the bean. There is no one “Japanese roast,” but there is overall a tendency toward denser brews. Indeed, the high rate of coffee consumption in Japan in part relates to the way Japanese prefer their coffee. Among the three largest coffee-consuming countries (the United States, Germany, and Japan) coffee in Japan is brewed strongest (grams of ground beans per cup), and this fact, in addition to the overall rate of consumption, raises imports. Japanese burendo coffee (the “house blend”) is a “thick” taste, strong to most Americans, approximately 13 grams of coffee per fourounce cup. A weaker cup in Japan, called “American” (like the Italian “Americano,” meaning an espresso thinned out with hot water), originated with the American soldiers of the Occupation and is seen as thin and sour. (“Sour,” as opposed to bitter, which is desired by tasters as an aspect of a good blend, is the product of badly dried or badly kept beans and can be somewhat masked by a stronger brew.) As Maruyama Kentaro of the Maruyama Coffee Company says, “The quality of the

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coffee is, in fact, the quality of the acid. By acid I do not mean the sour taste; it is the clear acid that is combined with the sweetness. In growing beans, the potential of the coffee gets higher at higher altitudes, and the quality of the acid gets more delicate and tasty.” 4 Overall, the Japanese preference for a stronger brew contributes to the high rate of consumption of coffee in Japan: more beans per cup means a higher import rate. But taste is also specific to region in Japan: coffee roasters and blenders formulate coffees according to local preferences. Osaka tastes are the “thickest”—up to 16 grams a cup and sometimes poured through the grounds twice. Nagoya prefers a medium-high roast and 13 grams of it per cup; Kyoto wants a higher (darker) roast and a 14 gram cup; and Tokyo favors a light roast and only 9 or 10 grams a cup: by comparison, Tokyo’s coffee is almost American. While it varies across America, the average nonspecialty coffee has about 8 grams of coffee per eight-ounce cup.5 The other high-consuming nation, Germany, has a greater range—from 6 to 10 grams. Beethoven, it is said, was a bean-counter, wanting 60 beans to his six-ounce cup of coffee— a very mild brew. From Maruyama’s taste buds to those of the ordinary consumer is a considerable distance, but the consumer is pulled along as taste rather than novelty drives the mainstream market, and as connoisseurship has trickled down to readers of some mass-market magazines, which offer a “curriculum” in coffee expertise. Consumer trends in Japan have their own patterns and trajectories and are marked by volatility among several niches and by the degree of integration of a product into the life of the consumer. In the 1980s and early 1990s, the emphasis was on the youth market, which was by its very nature a flamboyantly creative and volatile niche. Japanese trends overall have been characterized by the bounces and booms of youth trends, in clothes, food, music, and gear. The sober economic realities of the 1990s didn’t tamp down the speed and diversity of the market but did shift purchases to cheaper goods and smaller luxuries. Fewer Louis Vuitton bags were sold and more 350-yen cups of coffee as the rental cost of a seat in a café. Coffee tastes among young people vary strongly by gender. We have seen that young women like bright and cheerful cafés and sometimes are taken by sweet coffee novelty drinks. Older women tend to drink coffee in cafés and tea at home, and are not moved by flavored coffees. Nor are men of any age. While coffee has become diversified, it has also become “normal.”  

 

 

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Coffee consumption does not rely on the proliferation of new trends but rather on continuity and consistency, though newly introduced beans or production methods get attention. Some trends in coffee itself, like the trend for nostalgia cafés, evoke older and more rustic styles. Coffee roasted over pieces of natural charcoal—sumiyaki coffee—evokes a past rural sensibility and a modern “natural” trend in foods as well. It is interesting that Japanese roasted teas such as bancha or hoojicha are made the same way: sumiyaki-style coffee has tea antecedents. Outside a café featuring sumiyaki coffee there will be a basket containing pieces of charcoal, carbonized small twigs, and branches, signaling the simplicity of the rural past—a past that did not usually include coffee. Another old way made new is siphon coffee, described earlier, fairly common in 1950s cafés but now reinvented as a nostalgic branding of the shop that serves it as a place of old-style artisanal sophistication. In addition, coffee made in more elaborate systems, or cold-brewed for iced coffee in an imposing laboratory-like set of glass tubing and flasks, is both novel as a marketing device and evocative of the more elaborate siphons of the past. The Korean coffee chain Hollys (sic), with sixty-nine shops in Japan, displays cold-brew tubes in each of its stores, but only rarely are they in use. Their presence is enough to suggest novelty and science. In fact new, they give reference to the old. Hanafusa, a siphon coffee shop in Kyoto, has used the dramatic glass siphon since 1955 as its signature. The presence of a siphon system, like the slowly crafted filter coffee, indicates both the preservation of the old ways and quality, through dedication to one customer, one cup, at a time. Engaging the customer further in choices, Hanafusa’s coffee master asks if you prefer thick or thin body, bitter or mellow. To be a good consumer you need to know enough to have preferences. A customer is also a consumer of ambience: taste of all kinds is subsumed in the experience. Sometimes the atmosphere is historical, especially in some period cafés in Kyoto. The Cattleya café in the Gion area uses water from a sacred well (goshinsui, holy water) associated with the nearby Yasaka Shrine, selling not only historical sanctity but the taste such pure water is said to provide, as well as the health benefits the shrine offers against disease. The café, with dark wood paneling and turn-of-the-twentieth century lighting, has the mood of an artistic coterie café of that era. It attracts clusters of geiko (the Kyoto word for geisha) who come to relax here in the late evening after their work at parties in the Gion district, Kyoto’s traditional entertainment quarter. Cattleya’s blend was created by its original owner in the 1920s, in the first flush of coffee connois 

 

 

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seurship in Japan. Here, it seems, the authority of heritage is stronger than the lure of novelty and diversification. Few choices are offered, and passive appreciation is all that is required of the consumer. The baseline in coffee consumption has been purist: while in some coffee-loving groups in America and, more rarely, Europe, single-bean coffees represent “purity,” in Japan coffee drinking favors blends over single-bean infusions. The burendo is the “house coffee,” usually formulated by the shop’s master. The burendo speaks of his—or her—mastery of taste, color, and weight of beans. The concept of a house blend in America is a marketing term, but it carries little cachet and scant meaning. At a specialty coffee shop in Massachusetts I asked the coffee maker what varieties the house blend contained, and I was told that even the manager didn’t know; the coffee distributor supplied its own “house blend” every month to all of the independent cafés it served. In Japan, by contrast, in a small coffee shop where they roast their own beans, the owner was quick to describe the burendo of the day as a mixture of three beans created to suit the very cold, snowy weather of that day: the Salvador-Colombia-Brazil mixture, he said (each type of bean roasted on its own because of their differing weights, sizes, and moisture) would be a good mellow drink as a respite from the cold wind. Café masters often mention that their blend was done in consultation with a roaster friend, whose coffees the café sells on a small and very personal scale— the end of the trust chain we have described. Tasters emphasize body, the koku, of a brew, along a koi/usui (thick/ thin) spectrum, and look to the nodogoshi (aftertaste) as part of the experience. Starbucks shops in Japan do not adjust their brews by region; coffee fanciers say that this will be their downfall. References to these chain cafés are regional as well: in Tokyo the word is sutaabakusu but in the Kansai area it is staabaa—with a more denigrating sound than the Tokyo expression, I was told. As we will see, Starbucks has more than this strike against it in Japan, and its conceptual core notion is also controverted in Japanese café use. Tastes for coffee in Japan diverge strongly from those of Americans. Flavored coffees of the “mint-chocolate-hazelnut” types have not been a success in Japan, nor has decaffeinated coffee, which is seen as an Ameri­ can drink. While decaffeinated coffee is 15 percent of the U.S. total sales of coffee, only 0.15 percent of coffee sold in Japan is decaffeinated, mostly from American sources through Seattle. Japanese coffee experts say that the poor taste and aroma of imported decaffeinated coffee keep Japanese from drinking it, but there is also an official barrier to its consumption.  

 

 

 

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Somewhat counterintuitively to a Western observer, the processes of decaffeination—either water-processed or solvent-processed—are seen as potentially greater health hazards than high caffeine intake, and the Ministry of Health has made it difficult to get an import license for decaffeinated coffee. In 2004, genetic experiments in America and Japan produced a low-caffeine bean and in 2007, Ueshima Coffee Company announced that it is crossbreeding naturally low-caffeine beans to get a “natural” low-caffeine beverage, as a drink for the elderly and for pregnant women. The marketing strategy for decaffeinated coffee must first create consciousness of a “caffeine problem” for these and other groups, as few have concerns about caffeine in coffee. In an informal survey, I found that many Japanese claim that coffee helps them sleep and few report any sleep problems created by drinking it. In fact, most medical discussions about coffee in Japan emphasize its positive effects: a recent report noted that coffee drinkers in Japan have 51 percent lower incidence of liver cancer than those who do not drink coffee, and older people report less loss of memory if they drink coffee. The Japanese preference for hand-poured filtered coffee in specialty coffee shops such as Otafuku or Café de l’Ambre emphasizes the difference between mainstream American and Japanese practices. In most American cafés there are urns or press pots for brewed coffee service in addition to a countertop espresso machine. American versions of Euro­ pean styles dominate American cafés, but Japanese practices diverge: espresso-based drinks are not the choice of connoisseurs, who see them as machine products, demanding less personal attention and skill than the handmade, individually dripped cup. While Japan’s reputation for high efficiency and highly technologized manufacture place it at the extreme end of mechanization, the handcrafted product is more highly valued than the automatically produced. As one observer noted, in anime and manga—contemporary Japanese products that have become globally popular—this preference seems to contradict the burgeoning technologies available. Hand-drawn, page after page, cartoons are situated, like Japanese coffee, in the midst of contradiction.6 The high value placed on handmade (tezukuri) products also supposes a performance the customer can witness and understand. It is part of a continuum of human effort and skill. Like the sushi itamae-san, the chef who makes the sushi and hands it directly to the customer, the coffee performer commands attention, demonstrates authority, and thus embodies the trust that is at the heart of the coffee industry. A cup holds the relationship.7  

 

 

 

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F igu r e 14. Ambient Café Mole in Kyoto. Photograph by Kondo Minoru.

From this height to the other end of coffee consumption, the street and station-platform vending machines (jidohanbaiki), we travel far in taste. Canned coffee, first on the Japanese market in 1969 from Ueshima Coffee Company, has been very successful. The Japanese vending machine, created by Pokka Coffee in 1973, is the place where new ideas for products and merchandising for the fast-drink market are essayed. For many, the taste of canned “coffee milk” is a nostalgic trip to childhood. Many canned coffee drinkers got their taste for sweet and milky coffee—the most popular of the many types in the machines— from “coffee milk” served with school lunches. Coffee and sugar helped mask the sometimes off-taste of milk served in bottles or waxed cardboard containers; at home, too, preschoolers are encouraged to drink their milk by the addition of instant coffee and sugar. In the vending machines, in addition to the milky and sweet standard coffee, there are dark, unsweetened coffees—special evocative brews—as well as hot or cold teas, slimming or sweetened, and newer sports drinks, offering electrolyte replacement and high energy.8 The design and advertising of canned coffees often appear male-oriented: Boss Coffee, for example, displays strong-jawed male profiles on dark brown and black cans. Canned coffee is a category of drink quite distinct from coffee as it is served elsewhere: the man who slugs from a can between trains will  

 

 

 

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soon appear at a café for “regular” or specialty coffee. Generally, a person drinking from a can on the platform does not see himself as having a “coffee” but as having a convenient shot of something liquid and invigorating. The capacity of coffee to fill gaps and create new niches has been proved over generations of consumers. The home drink for most people born since the war is coffee, while older people might have both tea and coffee at home. Office use of coffee began to predominate over tea in the 1980s. Use at the office led to use at home. In offices, coffee demonstrates a status distinction: as one coffee commentator said, if you are offered a coffee service (cream, sugar, cup and saucer, spoon, and thus “fancy”) when you arrive at an office, you are a high-class visitor; if it’s green tea you are ordinary, and if nothing arrives, you might as well leave. After a long discussion over coffee, however, the hospitality cup of green tea might be added at the end of your stay. The pod-style “fresh brew” machines now make the older offices with tea-making female clerical workers (“OL,” office ladies) in service to their male colleagues look at the very least obsolete, if not chauvinist. The fascination with Japan that has accompanied the export of such “soft power” products as manga and anime now is associated with coffee as a uniquely Japanese “performance” but one that, like other cultural products, can travel. Shops like Barismo, Blue Bottle, and other sources of new coffee taste and performance in America learn the next new thing from Japan—while the upper-mass-market Seattle trends in coffee continue, with “latte” and “grande” seemingly mired in European models. Association with European coffee tastes and style, evoked in the Taisho period cafés as an aspect of Euro-yearning, now has nostalgic overtones, not only in the continuously operating old cafés in Kyoto, but also ironically in the trendy spaces of Starbucks, where the names of the brews evoke but do not reproduce Italian drinks. Meanwhile, for visitors to Japan the presence of sweet, creamy green tea frappés in some new cafés does not answer the question, Why is there no green tea in a Japanese coffee shop?9  

Why Did Tea Leave the Public Space? The offerings of the café usually do not include green tea. One of the biggest surprises is that coffee is the public drink of choice in Japan, not tea. It may seem odd perhaps that tea—grown in Japan and epitomized as the Japanese drink—did not become the preeminent modern  

 

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beverage. After all, the tea culture that arrived from China in the sixth century had become a durable fixture in Japanese life. In fact, Japanese green tea is the world standard for green teas, surpassing those of China. Tea has a connoisseur niche that is untouched by coffee’s public popularity and continues to be the subject of critical and aesthetic interest, as it has since the thirteenth century. In homes, in sushi restaurants, and as an alternative to coffee in offices, tea is ordinary and expected. The higher calling of tea as a ceremonial beverage remains intact, but coffee quickly became popular as a social drink, its public spaces eclipsing those of tea. Much as the geisha became a traditional culture performer when the coffee-serving jokyuu became a trendsetter fashion plate, so tea became an artistic Japanese icon while coffee came to represent a livelier modernity. Coffee was both more democratic and more novel, allowing entry to other new things as well. Tea was associated in Japan with Chinese Buddhist meditation when it first arrived in the sixth century, and later with medicinal practices. Not until the thirteenth century did tea reach a secular elite public as a sociable drink and, as Kato Hidetoshi points out, a political one as well for shogunal communication with subordinates.10 The practice of the tea ceremony spread in the Meiji era from court to commoner, as a demonstration of national culture now promoted as significant to a “Japanese” identity. Masters of coffee like Sekiguchi Ichiro in Tokyo appear to have established their own kata (stylized performance) of coffee, similar to the formulaic performances in tea, but coffee, as we saw earlier, is seen as more democratic and does not share tea’s kaisoo sei, hereditary system of cultural heritage and promotion—yet. Tea ceremony skills became in the Meiji era a requirement for a marriageable young woman and a means for personal gratification and amateur prestige for older women and men. Nihoncha, Japanese green tea, was omnipresent and could be “like the air”—as expected, as unconscious, as breathing, while at its start in Japan, coffee was marked.11 Teahouses of the nonritual variety were casual and social. In the eighteenth century, Edo had twenty thousand teahouses, one for every one hundred people, serving as few as three people and as many as fifty at a time. Kato calls these “multi-purpose communication media”—places where one could leave messages, show up for conversation, and find people, like the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century London coffeehouses. Teahouses, like English coffeehouses of the eighteenth century, were sometimes suspect as merchants, low in class status but increasing in economic power, appeared there in greater numbers. Officials might fear  

 

 

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seditious activity behind the social engagements. By the late nineteenth century, however, teahouses looked stodgy and conservative, while coffee became the drink accompanying the great changes of the age. Tea­houses became refuges for older, poorer, and less influential men, whose social lives there centered on a game of go, while coffeehouses were places where there were few demands on the visitor and no binding social or hierarchical obligations, and where coffee began to characterize a different environment from that of tea. And coffee had an edge of novelty that supplemented or stood for the other innovations entering Japanese society. Coffee and green tea are nonoverlapping beverages, seen rarely at the same tables or in the same spaces—other than in the ubiquitous vending machines, to be drunk out of hot or cold cans. An exception to the rule caught my attention in an elegant Taisho-style establishment in the Shinbashi area of Tokyo, where I was greeted immediately upon sitting with a glass of water, an oshibori (towelette), and a handleless cup of Japanese green tea. This is a coffeehouse—in fact, one of the premier places for superior coffee. The menu of coffees is extensive and takes some reading, which you do while sipping the hospitable, gratis cup of green tea before ordering the well-considered cup of coffee. The scene is paradoxical to Western eyes but demonstrates the fact that the two beverages are noncompeting and have different functions. The first is served as a sign of greeting and good service, the second a deliberately chosen object of consumption. Interestingly, the public consumption of green tea now follows coffee trends. The new green tea trend (“neo-Nihoncha,” as one consultant said) borrows the forms of Seattle-style coffee products, learning from especially sweetened coffee drinks. In teahouses with deliberately retrostyle furnishings, evocative of some generic “old Japan,” green tea preparations are served, such as a matcha-ccino (a bright green version of a cappuccino), green tea ice cream parfaits, iced sweetened matcha with a toothpicked lychee nut stuck in the glass, frappés, yogurt–green tea “smoothies,” and the like. They cater to young, trendy women and their well-known sweet tooth and are disparaged by tea cognoscenti just as whipped, sweetened, and flavored coffee drinks are seen as “coffee desserts” by coffee experts.12 Some of these trendy drinks are the indirect product of a health movement in America that promoted Japanese green tea as a healthy beverage; the movement “returned” to Japan and is now seen as the healthy alternative to coffee beverages. One chain drink company, Koots, has taken the Seattle template to green  

 

 

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tea and offers green-tea-based latte (hoji-chai latte, for example, cashes in on several trends—hoji is roasted green tea, spiced chai has Indian roots but became a popular youth drink in America, and latte seems to have become universal). The owner, Matsuda Kouta (who also owns Tully’s Japan), hoping to reconfigure and diversify café options, offers green tea as a “healthy” option and markets his sweet and creamy tea-based beverages as healthy if not dietetic. Kouta adopts new global ideas about health in his prospectus: against additives, pesticides, and coffee’s caffeine levels, he advertises organic matcha latte, made with h ­ ormone-free milk. While most Japanese, including the Ministry of Health, do not see caffeine as a significant problem, Kouta offers comparative caffeine data: coffee has 90 to 150 mg of caffeine per cup; green tea, 8 to 20 mg per cup, a “gentler caffeine” as he puts it. Another tea trend is expressly Chinese: not the refinements of a Chinese teahouse where old men debate the virtues of various brews, but an eroticized “colonial” China. These Chinese tea shops sell a period-piece exotic: they sell tea along with a glamorous version of 1920s China, with waitresses in tight-fitting cheongsam dresses. Such tea shops are closer to esunikku restaurants in their evocations than they are to kissaten. Some novelties, like Koots’s green tea concoctions, take their cues from fashionable coffee models; the next, it is said, will be chocolate drinks, or drinks made from cacao beans in the “Incan” manner of cacao-­ drinking—unsweetened or semisweetened with cinnamon and ground nuts. The cacao beans are “branded” by their terroir, or point of origin, and are ranked in their own hierarchies of value. A menu in a chocolate shop tells you “what’s just in off the boat,” and what percentage of your choice is pure cacao (there is health information in this as well). Trendy green teas have not yet engaged new public spaces as coffee has done, in spite of the efforts of places like Koots. The old-style chaya, attracting older visitors who might stay for hours, has been replaced by the neighborhood coffee shops, and tea by coffee. Tea is in everyone’s life, even that of the coffee fancier, whose day begins with tea: as one said, it is “what my wife brings with the newspaper in the morning.” On the opposite end of the spectrum would be the very much marked matcha, a disappearing experience. Fewer young people now undertake to learn the cultural surround of tea, its ceremonies and qualities, and many have never had a bowl of whisked powdered tea, unless on a school trip to Kyoto they try it as tourists. There they will screw up their faces in distaste at its bitterness, but they might later enjoy it as matcha ice cream in a cone. What green  

 

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tea did not do was provide the culinary innovations that came in with coffee: the café opened its doors not only to new people but also to new tastes in foods.

Food for the Coffee Cafés, as places where novelty was often expected, introduced foods to their customers, some not customarily eaten with coffee in their native places. Curry, for example, early became a café food, as did pilaf and spaghetti. Cafés of the kissaten type became places where a customer could train a global palate. The cabaret-style café focused more on alcohol (encouraging customers to spend more) than on coffee, becoming more like nightclubs, while other café types began to develop menus. In the arena of food, European café traditions were influential. Parisian cafés in the middle of the nineteenth century served food—a simple hot dish, salads, pastries, and breads at different times of day—not overlapping the function of a restaurant, but providing light sustenance. The early twentieth-century coffeehouse in Japan featured kare raisu, a food with a complicated heritage. When curry came to Japan in the late nineteenth century, as one legend has it by way of a visiting British sailor, or as another has it through the observations of Satsuma officials watching an Indian crew prepare “aromatic mud” aboard a French warship traveling to Europe, the Japanese taste for novelty had been well established. The popularity of curry rice in Japan began with the military adoption of this food.13 Coffeehouses in Japan served curry, as their counterparts had in England. In 1747 the first English coffee-curry house opened in the London Canning Town dock area—now Victoria Dock—made by a Bengali man we know as Mr. Ali. The recipes for English curry, sweeter than those of India with the addition of sugar from the Caribbean colonies, became codified about this time. English returning from the experience of the British Raj in India helped to popularize this food, and British seamen, not only the English rulers of India, were active disseminators of the taste. Curry powder, a British invention, standardized the taste and branded these curries as English. It was this curry that made it to Japan and became “Japanese.” Also appearing first in the café were pastries from France, parfaits, marron Chantilly (a chestnut puree with soft whipped cream), crème caramel (called purin, for “pudding,” in Japanese) and bavarois from France—as well as hotcakes or “pancakes,” an American treat, served as an afternoon snack rather than for breakfast as in America. One café  

 

 

 

 

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dish from this period that remains very popular today is “coffee jelly” (koohii zeri), made from sweetened coffee and kanten, a seaweed product used like gelatin. This Japanese invention was created in the style of molded jellies from Europe. All of these foods were considered haikara foods, from the phrase “high collar,” meaning elite or Western-modern, referring to the starched high collar worn by Western-dressing young men of the late Meiji period. The menus of cafés rarely included traditional Japanese dishes, though Japanese tastes and techniques were incorporated into ice creams, pilafs, doria (casseroles), and gratin dishes. Rice used in curries or pilafs was called raisu to distinguish it from gohan, meaning (often the same) rice served with Japanese foods. At Nakamuraya, an older Japanese curry house in Shinjuku, Tokyo, the history of “Indian” curry in Japan is on display—making clear the distinction of Indian versus “Japanese” curried dishes. Except in specific pastry shops, coffee is not seen as the accompaniment only for sweet foods, as in some cafés in America. In adopting foreign foods and particularly in the malleable space of the café, coffee can go with anything, from peanuts to ice cream. What it usually cannot accompany, however, is “Japanese” food. Curry rice, having become in some ways “Japanese,” seems an exception.14 These foreign foods had crossed over, experiencing sea changes on the trip. Some of these represent “Japanization” and some completely new phenomena. A large spoon was offered with curry rice or pilaf, for example. Sandwiches were to be eaten clutched in a napkin and not with bare hands. Other conventions seemed to have some crossover capacity from Japanese foodways. One of these is breakfast.  

The Most Important Meal of the Day Most foods at cafés are extras, snacks, or fill-ins. These are not restaurants. It should be noted that part of the licensing definition of a kissaten is that the establishment should not feature cooked meals.15 But the one service that defines a café as a food destination is the “morning set” (mooningu setto), a hybrid Japanese-American breakfast. The classic morning set gives you a choice of coffee or black tea, toast, perhaps a boiled egg, and almost always a salad. The thick white toast—often up to two inches in thickness—arrives buttered. The salad, with a tomato slice peeled back and cut to look like rabbit ears, is dressed with sesame salad dressing. The morning set developed simultaneously with the white-collar middle class, serving the needs of home and work schedules  

 

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F igu r e 15. Interior of Ambient Café Mole in Kyoto. Photograph by Kondo Minoru.

and convenient to the transport carrying workers between the two. It is also a touchstone for homesickness among Japanese working overseas, who miss this comforting and predictable start to the day. The draws are its quick availability and its price, as it often costs no more than a hundred yen (one dollar) over the price of coffee—typically 350 yen is charged for coffee alone and 450 to 500 for the whole tray—but its service ends before lunchtime. A competitive bid for customers in the Chukyo area, focused on Nagoya, has created “morning set wars” in which cafés race to provide more, cheaper, and longer breakfast hours. Buy a cup of coffee in some cafés before 10:00 or 11:00 and get toast and a boiled egg for free. Toyoda, the home of the Toyota car, is a leader in this service, offering it since the 1960s. Some charge for the service but provide it all day, in some you can even get as much bread and egg as you want with your coffee, and some offer alternatives such as salad, onigiri sushi, and chawanmushi (a savory egg custard) for free with the coffee. These are indeed popular places for the retired and the young who prefer to have someone else do the cooking. Some cafés have become known for their food as competition for customers increases. The menu is prominently displayed, and occasionally now a particular style of food, such as organic or “ethnic,” gives cachet  

 

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to the place. Some cafés offer vegetarian and even locavore foods. Cafés offer food at almost any time of day, distinguishing themselves from restaurants, where meals are served at fixed times. For this reason, cafés have become important as people’s lives have less-predictable schedules. In addition, one need not have a meal per se at a café: one can get a sandwich, a bowl of soup, a plate of spaghetti, or a cake without reference to any official version of a meal. Young people now eschew breakfast, have a snack in midmorning at their desk or between classes, and sit down at the end of the afternoon in a café in response to a gnawing feeling in the stomach. This freedom of ingestion has been both a response to and an enabler of the individual variability in meal schedules. Of course, coffee is also drunk at home, made in a variety of ways. Above all, however, the demand for quality has governed the palates and the purchasing of consumers, and has led to some remarkable issues in the coffee industry itself. Japanese cafés and coffee have begun to travel and to influence c­ offeedrinking elsewhere. Coffee from Japan has become an international object of desire. It is not the beans themselves, their provenance and vari­ eties; they are already global commodities. It is the care with which they are selected, roasted, and ground, as well as the handmade attention they are given in the brewing, that makes them “Japanese” in the world’s specialty coffee market. Already there are Japanese-made ­coffee- roasting machines, siphon systems, and hand-pouring methods on view in American cafés, and a rabid intensity of discussion of Japanese coffee rivaling that of fashionistas anticipating the next season’s runway styles. Consumption of coffee in much of the urban world has been determined by a large-scale corporate culture in which marketing has created a onesize-fits-all space and brew. Even those corporations aiming to provide a space and a drink evoking the local and intimate setting of a European café have become stylized and anonymous. Japanese coffeeways seem to offer us the antidote to the faceless options the food-industrial complex provides. The particular performance of taste and society the café offers is what makes it “Japanese,” but the idea of quality and a special place where this is assured transcend any cultural setting. Our conclusion will travel with those Japanese ideas. At Jaho, a café in Salem, Massachusetts, the owner-barista pulls perfect espressos for customers and meticulously makes siphon coffee and hand-pours. Jaime van Schyndel of Barismo roasts and sells coffee beans, consults with cafés, and offers apparatus for home brewing. Barismo is not a café but an establishment for the dissemination of high learning ­

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and standards in coffee: the shop offers weekend “cuppings” and, at any time, long discourses on good coffee. The impressive industrial roasters in the back area of the shop are modeled on the Fuji Royal, the top-ofthe-line Japanese professional roaster, but customized in Taiwan for this shop. The brewing materials, including glass siphon systems, brewpots, and filter papers, are imported from Japan. The coffee roasters here are not anime-manga fans who have added coffee to their list of adored objects from Japan; these guys began with coffee and then found Japan, where, Jaime says, fastidious work in coffee is “not obsessive” but produces the highest-quality drink. In San Francisco, Salem (Massa­chusetts), and New York City, the Japanese coffee-making lesson is performed and marketed. Learning from Japan used to be about management secrets; now it is about the cutting edge of taste and, paradoxically, a corrective to the anonymous global. The object of desire for some, the cup that cheers and restores for others, coffee has near-universal appeal. It can be both local and global, it can be welcome as ordinary and sought-after as extraordinary. It can be generic instant, supermarket ground beans, sourced, cleaned, dried, and roasted esoterically to fit the palate of an extreme taster. It can be Japanese, and so might your next cup be.

Chapter 7

Urban Public Culture Webs, Grids, and Third Places in Japanese Cities

“Sometimes it is enough just to be alone in a café. . . .” —A middle-aged businessman, Tokyo

 

Urban Japan and Its Public Spaces A city person may live in a quiet suburban margin and work in the teeming center, traversing several realms in a day. The conventional contrast, between tight-knit older neighborhoods and the loneliness of the urban crowd, does not fully describe this person’s journey. Leaving an intimate family scene in the morning, walking a back-alley walk to the station, boarding a crowded but anonymous train, and arriving at an intensely active workplace: within an hour or so a person can pass through four or more kinds of social space, some with jarring impact, some with more benign forms of proximity. A modern Japanese city provides many opportunities for interaction but only a few spaces where contact is voluntary and chosen. The café is one such space. The phrase “third space” as we have seen implies such a place, where the demands of others do not impinge. In the literature on Western, especially American cafés, the emphasis is commonly on the social aspects of the third place, the society that allows for connection in an otherwise increasingly individuated and isolating urban experience.1 But in Japan, though the social uses of the café are also evident and have been more pronounced in earlier eras, the most common experience of the café is changing: it is a place also to be alone, as the businessman in the epigraph notes. While many cafés in Japan encourage social performance, and some even insist on it, most people come to a café for the 127

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“weak ties” of connection to the master rather than the stronger ones to people one may connect with outside the café.2 Unlike the American café, which is said to provide a place for face-to-face connection (in spite of the earphones and laptops creating personal cocoons), the Japanese café provides relief for many from the social intensity of their regular days. You can stop paying attention. This is where home and work (or school) are not relevant—neither the home’s emotional density nor the purposeful schedules and duties of work—where, in fact, it is fine to do nothing, alone. Urban life in Japan, seen from a bird’s-eye view, is indeed dense and intense: waiting for a light to change, you can scarcely see the traffic for the crowd standing with you on the corner. In your office you are surrounded by heads like yours, bent forward to watch a screen or down to read a report. In the market street you watch carefully as you thread your way among pedestrians and bicycles, walking with close attention to bags, wheels, small children, and shop displays. There is little respite from noticing and calibrating personal, social, and architectural spaces. It becomes second nature, but it takes its toll. Japanese cities, like cities elsewhere, are places of both predictability and constant kaleidoscopic, unpredictable variety. You may take the same train to work every day—and its doors will open just where the platform markings indicate they should, and it will arrive just when the schedule says it will. But get off the platform and off the escalator and you are on a street where much less predictable events can take place. In large Western cities, there is the expectation that public places introduce and even encourage chance and novelty, and indeed in Japan too, city streets give witness to human diversity, even when at certain hours of the day that diversity seems clothed in the same dark suit, white shirt, and tie. The more jarring aspects of variety in urban life can be ignored by the man walking purposefully to work or by that pair of young ladies intently consulting their cell phones as they window-shop along a commercial street. One of the urban skills in Japan is “not-seeing”—paying as little attention as you can to things that might be uncomfortable to see or hear—self-protection perhaps, but also a strategy for negotiating differences that in a more monitorial society might be policed and removed from the scene. In public spaces such as the street, distinctions can thrive if they can be ignored. While conventions such as this can ameliorate urban stress to some degree, and the reliability of urban transport allows for a more or less  

 

 

 

 

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F igu r e 16. Alone in a brown café. Photograph by the author.

predictable passage from one place to another, there is still a sense of chaos barely under control in a city like Tokyo—and not just to a baffled outsider. In older parts of a Japanese city there are the tiny alleyways and the many neighbors who have known you since you were a child, along with the shotengai (shopping street), where the owners of the small shops expect you at the end of the day to buy what you’ll need for supper. And then there is the public bath, still evident and needed in such quarters, to which you might repair in the evening, and where you will see a lot, literally, of your neighbors. The conventional contrast between such districts and the high-rise apartment areas is not a neat one, seen from the ground. It is true that apartment dwellers, who would not have lived in the same building for generations or even decades, have fewer ties to one another. But there are still webs of responsibility similar to those of a neighborhood whose population has been durably fixed. The image of a web, with concentric circles of “sticky” networks, seems to describe the personalism of the family and its adjacent neighbors in an older quarter, while the image of a grid, regular and “rational,” is said to characterize the modern areas of a city, free and tied only by its physical patterning.  

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Japanese cities share some characteristics such as density and a fast pace, but each has its unique qualities as products of its own historical and topological factors. Tokyo, for example, for the most part built in webs of lanes later loosely organized by more recent grids, might confound visitors (even those from elsewhere in Japan) attempting to find a location by its address. Having a mailing address will not take you to your destination; street addresses will not take you to the door, as they do elsewhere. Even local people send each other maps by fax or cell phone, noting signs and landmarks as aids to navigation in their own city. In lieu of technologies such as GPS systems, a visit to the neighborhood koban (police post) for maps and more precise local knowledge will get you there. This, which some have called the most modern city in the world, does not seem to a Western observer to be “rational.” Tokyo’s unique city knowledge makes each citizen local. Kyoto, on the other hand, more ancient in its outlines, is built on a grid, modeled on a Chinese imperial city and centered on the imperial palace. It is as easy to navigate as New York City, with numbered streets laddering from north to south. A factor common to all Japanese cities, however, is the need for spaces between the grids—the intensely private and the wide-open public in this case. Cities mapped partially in webs contain lanes designed for foot traffic connecting houses, shops, schools, and clinics, and also, as urban planner Shibata Tokue notes, gridded modern streets designed for vehicular traffic in separate large-scale blocs. In lanes there is local movement; in larger roads travel is longer-distance. In lanes people on foot are recognized, and if they are not, they are marked as strangers; on roads they are most often from somewhere else and contained in their vehicles.3 The experience of modern life lies between webs and grids, between formal and informal spaces, between spaces created by human use and by technology and its demands. Crossings may become automatic and unconscious in a modern person’s life, but they never are accomplished without some stress. Without respite spaces—a temple ground, a park, a railroad station—where one can recover or prepare for the next encounter, Japanese urban life would be even more trying than it is. Mediating between the personal and larger frames, the intensely private and the very public, are the cafés we are examining. As city experiences move back and forth between neighborhoods and more anonymous or neutral locales, the meaning of such spaces in “public culture” shifts too. As we have seen, the historical uses of city spaces have changed in Japan. The cafés this book has treated describe  

 

 

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and accommodate that shift as they mediate between private and public zones in individual lives. A woman shopping in her local shopping street is known to the shopkeepers and speaks openly with them and with shoppers whose names she may not know, but who share the space of purchasing and conversation about fish or produce. She would seem odd if she did not engage in such intimacies. Outside of that space, however, in a department-store tea shop for example, she is anonymous and must respect the privacy of others by “not noticing” even those sitting two feet away. The expectations of public culture vary, between that of the intimate neighborhood “public” and that of the “general public.” Cafés for the most part are “unmarked” public spaces in Japanese cities. Temple or shrine grounds in one’s neighborhood can be extensions of the home and do not afford a personal anonymity. A temple ground is a place of casually predictable encounters that connect people who meet to sit together, catch up on news, and tend playing children. Unlike many cafés, these are “tied” or “engaged” spaces, where established identities are not set aside. Such places are disappearing, according to Shibata, who notes that in the reconstruction after the Tokyo earthquake of 1923, the shape of the city and its uses changed. New streets were designed for vehicular traffic, changing the use of small roads as gathering spaces and sites of communication into places to avoid, made dangerous by traffic and made inhospitable for social intercourse and mutual protection. The roji, the smaller roads described by architect Fumihiko Maki as one of the “layers of space” of Japanese urban life, were traditionally expressed in terms of the distinction between omote and ura, front and back. Roji were “back spaces,” where predictable encounters might happen, but the more public wider streets were the “front”—and more anonymous. The large apartment complexes that fill the inner suburbs have little space for serendipitous sociability, however densely they are inhabited. Maki says, with nostalgic regret and a concern for today’s city dwellers, that “inner space” in Japan has become “more and more compartmentalized” and that this formerly shared environment is no longer available—the “collective inner space” is disappearing.4 However, even after postearthquake construction, which created larger roads for commerce and transport in the late Taisho period, the functions served by the roji did not completely disappear, but, rather, went inside the new modern blocks. The spaces enclosed by the new boulevards or grand roads remained villagey, with small alleys connecting the houses that remained, dwarfed by the surrounding office buildings and apart 

 

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ment buildings on the larger roads. Such interstitial lanes have survived within older neighborhoods; there you find jumbles of homes and shops built at odd angles, and alleyways two people wide. In these irregular areas, homes had been constructed to be porous, their sliding doors open in the daytime, allowing neighbors access and visibility from the lane so that people could alert one another in case of fire or other danger. In the pre–motor-age past, such lanes were places where older people might bring small household tasks to work on companionably while watching their grandchildren playing safely in the packed dirt road. When motor vehicles introduced risk, noise, and dirt, people began to build protective concrete walls on the street sides of their houses and left the roads to the engines. Casual communication retreated behind the walls, or to shopping areas, cafés, and bars; fewer people found time at home to let neighbors “accidentally” into their lives, and getting together had to be a deliberate act. The formality of calling ahead when there were telephones to permit it replaced the casual drop-in visit; in the past all one did was call into the doorway, “Excuse me, are you home?” Where temple grounds no longer served, the café became a place of encounter, a kind of modern roji. The entertainment-quarter roji of the past, where Japanese flaneurs, urbane amblers, might give and gain cultural cachet and demonstrate their connoisseur’s “possession” of the city, have become objects of nostalgia. The stroller’s apparent aimlessness on today’s street might be suspect, replaced by speed, the recognized flaneur by the fast-walking stranger heading to bus and subway. Strolling might be a lost and possibly suspect act as streets became conveyor belts from one site to another.  

The Urban Person: Full Lives and Empty Spaces, and Vice Versa Georg Simmel, in his 1902 essay “Metropolis and Mental Life,” described the urban person as stimulated, creatively and positively, by the complexities of city life. This person with a “metropolitan” worldview would be eager, open, and fired up, would think quickly and act competitively, at once optimistic and hardheaded. This, Simmel suggests, leads to “saturation of the sensibility” masked by an outwardly blasé attitude. In attending to the game of city life, the metropolitan person cannot be too contemplative—optimistic activity is demanded.5 In Japan today, a modern Simmel metropolitan would be saturated also by the demands of family, school, and workplace, absorbing all of a person’s time, and  

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he or she would appear to have no room for the stimulations and pleasures a city might afford or for time alone. The flaneur, the cosmopolitan person pleasured by city diversity and enjoyments, might be hardpressed to find time for them. In Japanese organizations of all kinds, membership carries a premise of total engagement, a 100 percent commitment. But even with the high degree of embeddedness apparently required, there are urban times and spaces available away from one’s institutionally prescribed identity. In the Japanese city, the café is more valued for its solitude than for its society. Available and undemanding, the café is the place where the urban person finds at least temporary retreat and a reinforcement of the contrasts between modernity and the social embeddedness of traditional life. One of the contradictions illuminated by the café is contained in the common modern equation of autonomy with loneliness. In this rendering, community and individualism are juxtaposed, and modernity is taken to represent a move from connection to disconnection. Louis Wirth noted in 1938 that the city “supplants traditional social systems with both freedom and alienation for the Individual.” 6 The family-­villagecommunity may have denied the individual autonomous “freedom,” but it offered social support; the city, offering freedom, might make support harder to find. The extended family in the city, Wirth noted, might be unable to control persons for whom other institutions in city life offered satisfactions, and could not compete with the attractions of a mass experience, cultural or political. Families in cities had to yield to other institutional calls on the individual, and the demands on families themselves within neighborhoods and communities also constrained individuals’ time and allegiances. In the shitamachi sections of Tokyo, older, densely populated areas of shopkeepers and small trades and craftspeople, the “urban villager,” as Herbert Gans might have called him, is today a resident of a narrowly confined neighborhood, the edges of which put him in contact with the changing, less-connected areas of the city. These older neighborhoods are comparable to older “ethnic” neighborhoods in America, in which generations of residents are identified by their spaces in similar ways. In Boston’s North End, for example, identity through one’s church, in some cases by the very bells the Italian immigrants had brought with them from their villages, produces campanilismo—by your bells you will know them.7 London’s former cockney East Enders measure “authenticity” by a person’s proximity at birth to the sound of Bow Church bells.  

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Shitamachi residents might know their neighbors from the use of the public bath. In the public bath—a space available to everyone in such places (that is, everyone without body tattoos; yakuza are thus excluded)—the mission is more than getting clean. There is a convivial sociability in such neighborhood haunts. Such tight neighborhoods in the much larger surround of the city contain both people who never leave places where they are known and those who commute to more anonymous territory for work, study, or commerce. In Japan, the family is often engaged in the territory and relationships of the community through the people in the household whose time is most dedicated to the home. In most three-generation households this would mean the housewife and the retired elderly. As two-generation homes in modern neighborhoods have become less porous, less open to the accidental meetings that cement community, even those at home are not as available. The modern “city” person is urban in a different sense, living in a privatized home or large apartment complex where he or she has little social contact even with neighbors. Their social connections are focused, rational, functional, and less diffuse than those of a village. Their schedules are officially full, with little space for random local encounters or time out. There are urban spaces that engage these “modern” people, however. In bars there is a sociable anonymity (unless you are with a group of coworkers) in which you can invent yourself, and even be namelessly social, in a light and uncommitted way. The café as a public space, however, is different from the bath and from the bar: like the bath, it is a place of “shoji anonymity,” where what isn’t meant to be seen simply isn’t. (Shoji paper walls and doors let in some light and much noise from adjacent spaces, but paying attention, accounting for them, would be problematic.) In addition, the café is a place where one can take one’s time without the social demands of the bar and without the justifying task of bathing. For urban dwellers, this may be the freedom that is needed. The café can still the noise of the city, a noise that is both desired and daunting. In Japan as well as in nineteenth-century America, the city had its admirers and detractors.8 The conversation between city and country has long been engaged, and the characters of each drawn in strong opposition. The country person who was bound to a stultifyingly traditional context needed to be freed by the open streets of the city to be creative and autonomous. The city person needed peace and respite but if more permanently rusticated might lose his sophisticated edge. The word country itself came to signify “not the city.”  

 

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Cities in Japan, as in the West, are varied. While Tokyo has salience in corporate, media, and governmental clout, its style is not replicated in urban areas elsewhere. Regionalisms are one source of diversity. Henry Smith has discussed the San-to, the “three capitals” distribution of urban styles and qualities. In contrast to the unifocality of England or France, in which London or Paris is a single metropolis or “mother city,” Japan’s urbanity has been tripartite, Smith notes, divided among Kyoto, Osaka, and Edo, until modern times when Tokyo (the former Edo) became the very definition of urban. The functions and character of the three cities were noted in a colloquial shorthand: fixation on dress (Kyoto), on food (Osaka), and on entertainment and drink (Edo/Tokyo).9 The idea of urbanity in Japan is thus divided among the three cities, making Japan’s city culture less monocentric than that of England or France. Country and city are differently distinguished as well: the English seem to value the country and deprecate the city, or attempt to bring the country into the city (rus in urbes)—in the form of “civilized” parks, for example—and the Japanese appear to prefer the city. Even rapid industrialization and its urban depredations did not reduce the imaginative preference for urban life. Bringing rusticity into the urban frame in Japan—beyond the presence of daikon patches and spinach growing under plastic tents within semiurban areas—is part of a high aesthetic engaging the rough rural in what is called the wabi-sabi character of the teahouse. There are echoes of this in trendy coffee shops with bare wood counters and roughly planed tree trunks as room dividers. By contrast, as Smith points out, the actual Japanese rural was seen as “an untamed and almost inhuman landscape,” a Caliban jungle, while the English countryside was seen as tame and human. The Japanese rural person was “uncivilized.” This inakomono was a bumpkin, know-nothing, crude and unlettered—or simply tied to old ways and old relationships that strongly guided his world. But the inakomono could also be exalted by a romantic and markedly urban idea of rural purity, pastoral, open, and natural, contrasted to the polluted, tarnished, jaded, and artificial life of the city person. The surroundings, however, more than the person, governed this view. Until the Meiji period, Japanese cities, like their American and En­ glish counterparts, were seen as decadent, depraved, and immoral, “cities of dreadful night.” 10 For all their attractions and perhaps because of them, public opinion (frequently urban) held them to be places of dangerous disconnects from morality and the monitorial forces of religion and family. With the beginning of industrialization, the availability  

 

 

 

 

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of Western influences and new mobility, cities began to be magnets for their opportunities and pleasures.

Paths of Change in Urban Japan Urban transformations in Japan, though rapid, have not been uniform; there is no single path, no one template for city development. Cities, as we have seen, show geographical, technological, architectural, and social distinctions by era, historical experience (especially wartime bombing, fire, and earthquake), and local culture. The drivers of change include rapid population growth, industrial development, the development of public transportation, and the creation of mass markets for domestic and foreign goods, and the results of all of this are reflected in changing social patterns. Migrations from rural areas changed the shape of the city. By the 1870s, secondary industrial development and the creation of large-scale corporate establishments and government bureaucracies led the economies of cities as the older mercantile and artisanal middle class gave way to a new industrial white-collar middle class.11 As cities sprawled, m ­ iddleclass semisuburban belts moved outward, supported by new transport systems; but unlike the cores of American cities, Japanese urban areas did not hollow out. Instead, the traditional commercial shitamachi (“downtown” Tokyo) neighborhoods remained cheek-by-jowl with the Rengagai (Bricktown) Ginza development of brick residences, shops, and offices designed by an English surveyor, Thomas Waters, in the late 1870s. These, along with paved sidewalks, arcades, and columns, were built to replace a neighborhood that had been destroyed by fire. There was a certain irony in the fact that these most modern and Western of edifices came first to the most local of shitamachi neighborhoods, and indeed in the fact that they quickly became uninhabitable, with roof leaks and poor ventilation. The Ginza rapidly became the site of consumption of the new—new styles, new goods, new urbanites on parade. As a “bright-light district” lit by streetlamps and the new electrical lighting in the shop windows, the Ginza dazzled. Doing the ginbura, or Ginza stroll (a phrase supposedly created by Keio University students), from Shinbashi to Owari-cho, became a popular evening entertainment. Light itself was the attraction of the place as well as the democratizer of city streets, formerly seen as dangerous, dismal, or decadent in the dark, but now welcoming to all classes, more elite than not—and women as well as men. As a new  

 

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sakariba, it was a place where people went to be seen, to be the entertainment, to perform taste in dress, and to observe and learn from others. Ginza and its shops and cafés became a door to the international by the turn of the twentieth century, but also a pseudo-community in which recognition of others was part of the appeal. As one observer in the 1920s noted, “Everybody on the street wears as passport . . . fine dress. . . . They seem to have a singleness of purpose in seeing and showing off, and in this there is something of kinship among pedestrians that make them feel they almost know one another. This made the so-called fashionable section of the Ginza a sort of a ‘moving club’ for the night life de luxe of the Capital.” 12 The social capital gained by doing ginbura, however, soon lost its value, as visitors to the city from surrounding areas began to engage in it. These outsiders were seen as aspiring to something they could not really share—the insider aspect of Tokyo street status. Tokyo’s homegrown moga and mobo left the stroll to the strivers after urbanity, reinforcing their own cultural capital by sitting at coveted tables in the cafés and restaurants. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, as described by Manuel Tardits, the Ginza and Marunouchi districts grew into new kinds of spaces, public-private zones, because of the creation of railroad stations and department stores.13 Shinbashi Station, constructed in 1873, connected Tokyo with Yokohama, allowing people and ideas from the foreign concessions of Yokohama to bring their novelties easily to Tokyo and vice versa. Tokyo Station, now an epitomizing landmark of Meiji celebration of Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War, connected the rail line across the city from south to north, from Shinbashi to Ueno stations. Built in red-brick European design, the station, though later than other modern structures thanks to war-caused delays, has significant centrality—it faces the imperial palace. The areas around railroad stations became zones of commerce, and sometimes the railway line itself owned department stores, as in the case of the Tokyu trains based in Osaka. The Hankyu stores and trains there set a pattern providing integration of transportation and consumption, as each terminus of the private line had its own corporate store, often built over the train station itself. Department stores, also novel places, introduced new goods: many visited them as if going to a museum or exposition, for entertainment and education as much as for shopping. The Ginza department stores, Matsuya, Matsuzakaya, Mitsukoshi, and Takashimaya, grew out of the earlier dry-goods stores such as Echigoya and Shirokiya. The older com 

 

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mercial zone overlapped with the new sites of trendy shopping, where consumption as amusement overtook older buying practices. In the older stores, customers would be invited in to see goods spread out before them as they requested. Little was on display, and browsing was not customary. As Tokyo’s population increased, and when the circular aboveground train line, the Yamanote, was finished, people of different backgrounds and experiences were brought into proximity to one another. The new middle class of white-collar workers traveled on these trains through districts where the old middle class lived, the shopkeepers and small trade and craft families. In shitamachi areas “urban villagers” lived in small houses, usually with a commercial establishment on the first floor and living quarters above. People grew up playing in the alleys with neighbor children, went to school with them, and continued to live near them throughout life; but such people today are not considered parochial bumpkins. People whose families have been residents for four or more generations have the legendary and authoritative cachet of London’s cockneys, in full ownership of the city, proud and not cowed by elites: these are edokko, children of old Edo. However urban, such neighborhoods were (and are) places of tightknit clannishness. Tensions are inevitable when your life is everyone’s business; it is hard to find a place where you can rest in unwatched solitude. As one sixth-generation shitamachi resident said, “A café can take care of all that pressure, and you don’t even have to leave the neighborhood: it is a good place to be alone.” In yamanote areas, on the other hand, new housing included large blocks of apartments or houses, forming neighborhoods where none had existed before. In a community built from scratch the shitamachi intimacy was lacking, and a café might by contrast provide a drop-in site for connection with other people. As transitional facilitators, cafés have displayed the urban and modern, and at the same time offered relief from its anomie. Migrant workers from the countryside, needing to learn the urban ropes, went to kissaten where those from their region had gone earlier, entering a network for passing on information in a dialect they could understand. These “settlement house” cafés were very much like the English public houses in London where newly arrived industrial workers could make contact, or like the Irish pubs in Boston where new immigrants found work, housing, and solace. Rapid urbanization and industrialization in Japanese cities seem overall to have produced fewer rifts and dislocations than in the Ameri­can

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case. There may be several reasons for this. One might be that most rural migrants arrived in Japanese cities linked to new jobs by kin or village connections, making the move relatively well supported and conditions for residence in the city more stable. People who did arrive unconnected managed to make connections through prefectural linkages, and while personal ties might not always be reliable and the trauma of changing location would always be significant, the movement did not represent fractured relationships. Cafés helped. One such migrant, Kobakura Yasuyoshi, grew up in the Taisho period in Okinawa—a real hinterland, or so it felt. When he came to Tokyo he was taken to a café by a sempai, an older friend from his region who’d come before him. He frequently went thereafter, not, as he said, because he wanted to drink coffee, but because “the kissaten was a clue (tegakari) to understand a big city quickly.” He learned “people’s ways, looks, attitudes, talk—models of sophistication” while drinking coffee. At the time, coffee was expensive for him, so he walked instead of taking trains, and the money he saved he spent in cafés, as 15 sen for a train ride was the 15 sen a cup of coffee cost.14 It was in spaces like these that new urban lore was passed from person to person, in noodle stands and cafés, and where inexpensive versions of newly acquired urban haikara (“high collar,” fancy) tastes might be found. In the early Taisho era, as more young people came to cities for education, they would gather at cafés as social spaces away from classrooms and boardinghouses. The café for them, as for the rural migrants, was a space of learning. Cafés encouraged education among student peers, offering opportunities to learn and contend over philosophy, literature, and politics, in a space where changing the world seemed possible or where, an aspirant hoped, a display of wit might enhance his intellectual reputation. In the late 1920s, the café offered a fulcrum by which political activists could attempt to move history. During World War II, when political discussion was under official scrutiny, the last public social spaces still open as rations ran out were cafés, serving sometimes only rice crackers and “substitute coffee.” In Kyoto, where there was no aerial bombing during the war, some cafés managed to stay open serving hot water and nuts. Scarcity did not end with the war, and during the postwar reconstruction and recovery eras cafés were an affordable luxury for most people when other amenities were out of reach. Cafés have been places of both challenging novelty and predictable comforts, places of both creativity and ordinariness, protean spaces in  

 

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times of apparently rock-solid resistance to change. In the 1880s, modernity was foreign, but quickly modern became Japanese. The 1920s modern was a brand evolving out of the elements of foreign contact such as dress, music, and furnishings, but the people who engaged it did not usually think of themselves as “international”—just “modern” and of course “Japanese.” Japanese bunkajin (culture people), writers and painters and others, returning from overseas having done the circuit of cafés in Shanghai, Ber­ lin, Paris and Vienna, came back to Japan to interpret the novelties for others. Aesthetic learning in such places involved flows in all directions. The postwar, preboom years brought people back to cafés to make up for years of deprivation. Movies and cafés filled people’s need for inexpensive entertainment. European-style cafés, such as the 1950s multilevel, atrium-ceilinged Vienna in Tokyo, brought people out to retaste elegance in its dark wood chairs and velvet seats and in the richness of the schlag on the coffee. The excellent acoustics of the meikyoku kissa (classical music café) provided concertlike experiences of recorded music. Such places are now seen as nostalgic museumlike rooms, appearing in guides to what are called “sepia cafés”—old cafés photographed in sepia to convey the mood of the past. For younger people who would not have experienced the originals, the past is a style on parade, enjoyable as a mood. Older visitors come for continuity with the past and call for their favorite music, week after week, as the bound ledgers reveal. As one frequenter of Coffee GoGo, a workaday café for older residents in Kyoto, said, “This is such an old-fashioned place, but the oldness is what we adore today, and we want the place to stay as it always used to be. On the wall, on the ceiling, we can catch a glimpse of their history as witnesses of city life.” Such visitors sit there as they might always have done, enjoying the treat that was once the only treat they could afford. A regular there said, “Somehow this place reminds me that when we had less we had more.” This encounter with the past has produced what Walter Benjamin might have called a “confrontation of the most recent past with the present”—experiences of shifting boundaries of time and eras, as the past becomes a touchstone marker of what has changed.15 The café becomes the producer and container of memory and culture, of a time when listening to recorded music was both personal and social, an “alonetogether” act. The new middle class found a new use for the café in the 1950s and 1960s. These cafés bridged home and work, offering time off from the  

 

 

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demands of both. Frequently overworked salaryman employees needed limbo spaces for solitude quite different from family, work, or social milieux of bars. Solitude has always characterized a particular Japanese sensibility, that of the contemplative, meditative experience, aestheticized in the wabi-sabi of Zen arts and tea culture. These constructed moments of aloneness are seen to be creative and restorative—in part because they are brief respites from the normal embeddedness of one’s life. Being alone in urban Japan engages both the positive aspects of “aloneness” (sabishisa) and the more problematic premise of untetheredness, which was seen in the 1920s as one of the risky disengagements of modernity.16 “Modernity” in Japan as a defining quality of space, time, and culture is notably shifty and full of paradoxical juxtapositions. Modan now has a historical cast, framed in past tastes and interests. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it applied to Western approaches to statecraft, and to Western industrial and technological development. Modan in the 1910s and 1920s in café cultures meant a more public display of social, cultural, and aesthetic changes in behavior, decor, and dress. Modan now refers to the bootstrapping period of reconstruction and to the Bauhaus-infused aesthetic style of the 1950s. One café owner, with a longer reach, said that to him and his clientele, “modern” is art deco. As modernity becomes a reference to the past, it sometimes takes on nostalgic overtones. Cafés of this past now, like the “brown café” of figure 16, speak to a positive engagement with melancholy, sometimes as a wallow in memory and sometimes as a creative relationship with a particular object—like a cup of coffee. The popularity of a café rests not on its style as much as on its reliability, predictability, and comfort. For some it must reflect on the customer’s style and taste: it should be distinctive. The café as a modern site is by definition protean: Japanese cafés in their shape-shifting tell, reflect, and create urban life in a constantly evolving, diversifying, merging, and sometimes problematic social space. The café’s longevity and proliferation are evidence of its local uses rather than of its early foreign origin or of the trend breezes that blow through it. The teahouse could not change; it was associated too deeply with old ways. Nor can places like the neighborhood bathhouse or the temple grounds, though each may have adapted to change. The bathhouse in some neighborhoods has, for example, rather striking new plumbing technologies, and amenities such as bars and television lounges; temple grounds might now house a day-care center to aid working mothers in the neighborhood.  

 

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F igu r e 17. Lush Life jazz café in Kyoto. Photograph by Kondo Minoru.

For the café, however, it is the shape-shifting itself that has allowed it to do more than persist. We have seen how the paths from home to work positioned the café as usefully central in people’s lives; an example of this use may remind us of its functionality.

Families in Urban Space: The Place Between Families and the individuals they comprise today find cafés all but essential. Shimomura Naoko, a mother with a part-time office job, hurries the children out to the bus stop with the lunches she woke at 5:30 a.m. to make. The younger child resents being led as much as the bossy older sister hates the responsibility of shepherding her brother; Naoko has a quarrel on her hands. Her husband, Shigeru, stands waiting for her to find him a clean handkerchief. He is determinedly not-hearing the children and not-seeing her face, whose reproaches, he might figure if he allowed himself to think about it, are focused on him. What she wants is not his help but his absence. Part of their silent understanding is that he will get out of the house quickly and into his regular café where he will have a cup of brewed coffee, thick white toast, a small salad, and a boiled egg, a short respite marking a transition from home and its childfocused chaos to the office and its demands. This mooningu setto both

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serves his and his wife’s needs for time out and also serves to outsource one of his wife’s home duties: among the many functions the urban café performs, providing breakfast can relieve family tensions. Shimomura Shigeru is one of tens of thousands of city workers (not all male) who take their breakfasts in the neutral territory of a kissaten or café. This vignette describes only one use of kissaten in contemporary city life in Japan. It has been said that the café was Japan’s great modernizer, but it now can provide social and cultural flexibility in the presence of rigidly defined institutions and roles. The café is neither a modern version nor a functional equivalent of anything in the past; it is a space created in and for the interstices of modern life, constantly responding to changes in other institutions and, by doing so, helping to support them. One of these changing institutions is the urban family, which as it became smaller and more “nuclear” became more tied to school, workplace, and locations of consumption and entertainment, and was eventually less able on its own to fulfill the needs of individuals. The modernizing family, as Vera Mackie describes it, was more private than its predecessors, more contained within a household. A traditional family was measured in time, generations succeeding generations, while the modern family, as it became nuclear rather than linear, was simply defined by space.17 Jordan Sand too notes the “normative significance” of the family home as it stood for family solidarity at a given moment in time.18 What people considered “family” might refer to other residences, other kin, but the operative “family” in modernization meant those who lived together. As the household became smaller and its residents more likely to be a two-generation family and, paradoxically, as its members were drawn out into the world of work and school, it became more private. Home became a support system for the adults and children whose primary locus of activity was elsewhere. Middle-class life in Japan assigned family members to different spaces from those they had filled in the past as fathers, children, and mothers. Women’s roles, if not places, had changed in support of men’s new occupational patterns and in support of children’s success in school. By the 1920s a new consumer culture had reshaped the home. Depart­ ment stores showed families who now shopped together a model of new domestic culture through displays including, eventually, cooking lessons. Through advertising, itself now “modern,” in new print media, the redefinition of women’s roles through the “professionalization” of household management and home economics gave women an ideological centrality, altering the space and meaning of home itself. Housewifery became

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a conscious, explicit rather than implicit set of skills and standards, “modernizing” the housewife role while “feminizing” the home. This rise of the cult of domesticity, especially as mapped in women’s magazines, made middle-class women into secular saints, to be contained in the bosom of the family, protected from urban dangers, and yet, as competent homemakers, given the power of budget and home management. The Meiji phrase ryoosai kembo, “good wife, wise mother,” described this woman-in-the-home, the okusan—literally, the “woman within.” 19 The good woman, in her identity and work, set home apart from the dirt and unpredictability of the urban streets. In this role, she was cast as the private heroine of a stable bourgeois household. She was also, like her American counterpart of the early 1900s, the “scientific housewife,” whose knowledge of nutrition and whose efficiencies turned the kitchen, formerly a dark and unwelcoming back room, into a modern production center.20 That this feminine domestic role was encouraged just at the time women in large numbers were called out of the home and into the industrial workplace is no coincidence. The ryoosai kembo designation helped to create new class distinctions of womanhood as well, when older ones had fallen away. Only a woman whose husband earned sufficient wages to support their middle-class status could afford to be the virtuous residential housewife. Neighborhoods were also shaped by the women whose roles kept them there. The fact that most people now live near the things and services they need is in part due to the assumption that there will be a rusuban—a (usually female) person in the house whose life is centered on the maintenance of the home. By contrast, the working-class woman had a more public face. The woman of work was not the virtuous and invisible housewife: she helped to fuel industrialization in textiles and other industries. At the bottom of the ladder she worked in mines and industrializing agriculture. As dekasegi rodo (worker away from home), she might live in dormitories in semiurban areas near factories, contracted by labor brokers from rural areas, or she might have a more independent and uncertain life in the city itself, renting a room or boarding with relatives or connections. Her term as a laborer was usually only about three to five years long, and she was meant to return home unchanged by her work life. The state of her virtue and future marriageability would be a concern for her family, but the worth of her wages was a greater priority, as she would send money home—or have it sent by the factory. Her contribution in itself made her a dutiful daughter, which had its own kind of virtue in a working-class family.  

 

 

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Some of these young women of the Taisho era made their way into the public life of the city, for factory and office women spent on themselves as they could and particularly on apparel that would put them on display in the ginbura and in the cafés. In these modern pleasure quarters, women now amused themselves, not only as objects on view but as persons engaged in learning the modern. They were free to walk either daringly with men, walking abekku (from the French avec, “with”) or, with less social risk, with female friends. They were part of the Taisho urban landscape.

Spaces and Boundaries On my first sojourn in Tokyo as a young student in the 1960s, I was charmed by the jumble of certain neighborhoods: two-story wood houses, seven-story concrete apartment buildings (in those days the maximum height of a building was restricted to eight stories because of earthquakes), workshops, temples, shops, and cafés all higgledy-­piggledy, in friendly disorder, or so it seemed to me. I had read that a city dweller need not travel more than three hundred yards from her door to find all the daily needs of the home, from fishmonger to dry cleaner.21 Near my residence was a shotengai, a shopping street, with an arched entrance over the street.22 This marked the beginning of a narrow byway with shops tightly packed, surmounted by a half-roof strung with seasonal plastic decorations, plum blossoms in February, cherry blossoms in spring, orange maple leaves in fall, dusty but not shriveled by the end of their “season.” Housewives often shopped twice a day for food because before the 1970s refrigerators were not common in homes. These were places where you met your neighbors, where the shopkeepers knew what you were looking for, or saved you a fish you particularly liked, and where your shopping break in a café had a strong social component. Zoning patterns of American cities, where business, residence, and industrial production identify different districts, are less marked in Japan. In every older neighborhood all these functions are served together. Younger, more recent neighborhoods are less agglomerated, isolating commerce and work from residential areas in a de facto zoning. But the premise remains, even in what might be called “suburban” neighborhoods, that one should be able to sustain daily home life on foot, and in newer apartment complexes small shops are included in the development—even if now they are more likely to be chain convenience stores than independent local shops.  

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In such neighborhoods, the idea of a place where with only mild purposefulness one can go and be both engaged and neutral, meet people or not, has become the essence of the café: its very lack of definition is its identity. In the mid 1960s, there were 27,000 coffeehouses in Tokyo. The peak was reached in 1985 when there were about 155,000 cafés in Japan. By 2008 there were about 83,000 in Tokyo. There is scarcely a block without one or more kissaten, whether for community or for solitude. Being alone is a singular and rare experience in the intensity of family and work life, and the anonymity of a café is frequently sought. The train station, park, department store, temple yard, or shotengai does not offer the same legitimacy as does space bought for the price of a cup of coffee in a café. Too much time in a dusty temple yard might raise concerns; sitting alone in a café, you may have a newspaper or book to read and you will not be marked as nekura (dark-souled), a person who lacks the face of brightness needed even in a faceless location to be seen as “normal” and appropriate. Japanese city-dwellers lack both time and space; relatively affluent, they find that the time for using the goods they can afford is as scarce as the space to put them. Homes are crowded places: the cupboards and pantries are full, and the machinery of daily life sits in a jumble, with vacuum cleaners, space heaters, televisions, and speakers stacked on boxes containing clothing or other goods. This is scarcely the stereotypical image of serenity and calm projected in scenes of tatami-matted rooms, sans Western furniture and decorated only by the tokonoma (sacred alcove) with its one stem of a seasonal flower and one evocative scroll. Almost no one has this luxury of clutter-free space now. If you leave the apartment or house, the sidewalks are full too: vending machines, bicycles, potted plants, and the inevitable lines of waterfilled plastic bottles as protection from dogs and cats fill every available space. In a small parking lot, with a six-car footprint, twenty or more cars are parked, stacked vertically with the use of a ramp and lift. In such an environment, a seat at a café is almost required. The café’s attraction among others is thus the provision of space. While other conditions—the possibility, though rarely enacted, of good coffee made at home, access to friends and family through cell phones and other social media—may have made cafés less crucial either for beverage or for sociability, the simple and continuing fact of space deprivation will assure the future of the urban café. It helps to make things work.  

 

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Cafés on the Downside Cafés can reveal what is not working in society as well. A café can be a refuge for the down-and-out. In the early 1990s, even middle-class whitecollar employees in “lifetime employment” jobs seemingly immune from layoffs might find themselves without jobs, and the shock of this made some unable to tell their families immediately. Stories of workers dressing in office suits in the morning and saying good-bye to their families for the day, only to go to a café to while away the hours, were common. Even those who’d told their families they’d been laid off would get out of the house to sit in a café, embarrassed and oppressed by unspoken but clearly negative feelings in the house if they stayed home. Such a café is in the Toranomon section of Tokyo, near all the large government agencies but tucked into an interior block, not on a major thoroughfare. Jump is a normal-looking kissaten, with Naugahyde-upholstered booths around the sides and tables in the center of the room. There are well-thumbed manga and magazines in two large bookcases, two tables with built-in video games in the surfaces, and a television near the counter playing constantly. The middle tables are usually taken by transient visitors, but at some of the booths are men of working age but of no known work. Sugimoto-san is one of these men. He was fired in 2005— well, he says, not actually fired, but given a position with no work to do. He is paid a low wage, all but terminated, and feels awkward going to his office with no assignments at all. So he comes here, reads, takes a walk, goes to a noodle stand at lunchtime, and then goes home. He has not told his family. The office is nearby, he takes the same trains as ever, but there is no work.23 There are darker, stranger ways to spend the time, however. The new manga/Internet cafés provide a service to the even more alienated, private, and out-of-work. These are dark spaces, usually in large buildings, a floor across, divided into small cubicles. Walking in the dark down the aisles is an eerie experience: there are flickery lights where a “resident” is watching a video, vague buzzing where in a “double” two people are chatting while playing computer games, and there is muted music where someone is listening on almost sound-masking earphones. Occasionally there are snores. In 2007, data on out-of-work men included about five thousand who stay semipermanently in the newer manga/Internet cafés, virtually moving into these twenty-four-hour places as their family relationships dete 

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F igu r e 18. Hachi Hachi Infinity Café in Kyoto. Photograph by Kondo Minoru.

riorated. For about 2,500 yen ($25) you can stay for five hours or longer and have a vending-machine meal and a shower in the morning. They are useful for those who’ve missed the last train home, but now they also house those who won’t or can’t go home for other reasons. It seems as though being hidden in these semipublic spaces is better for some than explicit admission of defeat and accommodation within the private spaces of family.

When a Village Is What It Takes Lawrence Wylie, in his classic ethnography Village in the Vaucluse, depicts the café as the heart of this traditional French village. He says that the café makes no demands and is everyone’s, a “neutral meeting ground, the only neutral spot where villagers and outsiders may come and go freely.” 24 As a “neutral meeting ground,” the café in a village performs a community service: it allows people to congregate in a space that is neither home nor work. It may allow for nonneutral self-expression and actions. It is the place of politics and coded nuances of behavior as well as drama worthy of the Grand Guignol; it is a place where community is built and maintained—or repaired, if necessary. It is where informa 

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tion is exchanged—the kind that is not in any newspaper, but rather created by and among the inhabitants themselves. That function alone was to Wylie’s café denizens worth many sous. The café in Japan too can offer both community and freedom from one’s usual roles and responsibilities. In the urban Japanese version, what happens in the “village” of the café stays there. Wylie’s café hosts a densely interconnected clientele, which defends its culture and keeps track of its strays. The urban café in contrast offers more anonymous seats in the theater of change, different from other places in one’s life where meaning and identity are made. One’s identity in home, school, or work is established through relationships and responsibilities. But in a café, a diligent student can read a comic book, a serious businessman can stare into space, and a uniformed office lady can write a passionate poem. People congregate in cafés out of desire for social contact or go as isolates to seek privacy. In Japan, as elsewhere, the village, whether a closely tied urban neighborhood “village” or a rural hamlet, is said to be narrow-minded, conservative, burdened with unwanted intimacy and “what-will-the-neighbors-say” watchfulness. City life has its own difficulties: it is anonymous, stressfully fast-paced, and crowded. Today’s Japanese elderly find cafés for both relief from isolation and relief from the pace of urban life. The café is said to provide solace from stress and protection from too much engagement, comfortable connection and just enough society (what one customer called “borrowed community”) to palliate loneliness. The village, in all its intensity of social responsibility, is an object of nostalgia, and perhaps especially as imagined by those who never lived in one. Nostalgia comes hard on the heels of change. As Jennifer Robert­ son describes, the growth of urbanization often contains the seeds of its rejection—“urban” might thus include a catalog of ills viewed in the frame of nostalgic images of a utopian agrarian society.25 In new construction today as well, a gathering space, a tamariba, might offer nostalgically evocative shops and a café creating a central focus in an otherwise featureless landscape. The residents have little in common, not having grown up together, and little at stake in the community but for a say in the aesthetics or the regulation of sanitation services. A recent project, the development of Roppongi Hills in an elite modern part of Tokyo, speaks to some of these meanings of habitation. Minoru Mori, the developer, spoke of creating vertical villages in the high-rise condominium buildings. He cited as examples the common areas estab 

 

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lished every fifth floor as gathering spaces like “village squares” and the monthly barbecues for residents on the roof in a garden that also includes an iconic rice paddy.26 The machizukuri movement in Japan, the “new town planning” efforts, have similar goals. For the most part, machizukuri initiatives involve building environmentally sound, safe urban neighborhoods, but the utopian ideas of “garden cities” have their roots in a rural village model, one with social concerns, such as the welfare of children and the elderly.27 In newer homes for the elderly, day-care centers for toddlers and nursery schools have been included, representing an attempt to provide a villagelike intergenerational experience, seen to be missing in isolated urban nuclear families with few children and no grandparents.28 Cities failed to provide these things, configured in “village” terms, and only an artificially constructed community could at least reach for a version of them. The goals of “healthy living” and “good places to raise children” meant country-in-town or town-in-country communities following on English “garden cities” but with more of an urban feel.29 Den-en Chofu and other areas of western Tokyo, for example, were utopian social experiments, beginning in the early 1900s, engaging “the convenience of city and livability of the countryside,” as Makoto Koono, an urban critic, noted. He cited the need for such places because “in Japanese cities, there are passageways but no streets, there are means of shipping but not transport, there are wide open spaces but no parks, there is land but no residential space, there is expansion but no growth.” 30 This critique has resonance in the popular urban planning manifestos of the day. Seki Hajime, the mayor of Osaka in the early 1900s, was such a reformer. He wanted healthy environments for his residents, but his utopian community was not suburbia but a healthy city—sumigokochiyoki toshi—the livable city. Industrial workers—not just the middle class— were to have light, air, and space to be healthy and productive. In general, Japanese cities took their cue (and town planning schemata) from European models. The nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ameri­ can moral bias against urban life31 had no serious Japanese counterpart and did not push families out of dense urban areas (and small houses or apartments) into morally sanitary suburban zones “good for raising children,” even if, as Henry Smith has noted, there was a similar tension between urban and rural in changing Japan. Richard Sennett notes that modern Japan produced a new kind of urbanity in which the classes mixed and examined one another, but did not socialize.32 Taking a seat in a café did not automatically introduce  

 

 

 

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a visitor into a new community. Side-by-side rather than face-to-face engagement—what is called in nursery schools parallel play—characterized the behavior of persons of different backgrounds and interests using the same café. People who came to Tokyo from the hinterlands, for example, would observe what they might emulate, but they would scarcely strike up a conversation with those obviously from other cultural niches. City life had a positive image for most Japanese of the Taisho period— the yearning for a rural past did not appear until later, and was not always accompanied by a denigration of the urban present. Other aspects of the countryside—the harsh life of an agriculturalist, dependency on weather, labor-intensive manual work—made city life look good. Over all, the inclination toward the city was stronger than the push away from it, and the social spaces had a particular draw: many of those coming to cities did not want to establish a village there; they wanted anonymity, fluidity, and novelty, and the excitement of spontaneous experiences. In the development of neighborhoods, however, there was a tendency to create nodes of commerce and services. The creation of shotengai was tied to efficiency, profit, and the evolution from periodic to stationary marketplaces, and from stalls to shops, rather than by a postindustrial desire to situate commerce apart from residences. That people could satisfy their needs within an easy walk was thus not a “village” principle but a natural aspect of an urban community, which creates its own social and economic networks. As Theodore Bestor notes, the idea that Tokyo is a “congeries of villages” is a “hoary cliché.” 33 As he says, the creation of a sustainable neighborhood is a response to city life, not a retreat from it and not, as he notes, the residue of a preindustrial past.  

 

 

 

 

Sakariba and the Unmapped Places The sakariba (animated spaces) where a new urban vernacular was created had proliferated in larger cities well before modernization. These included small public spaces carved out of corners where several lanes connected—an open space where yatai (tents or shacks where simple foods like noodles are made and sold) were set up at night or small stalls were erected where you could have your shoes repaired or other services provided. Another type of sakariba could be an area where the small roads between bars, restaurants, and cafés acted as gathering spaces for those who frequented the entertainments or just imbibed their atmosphere. Sakariba held out the allure of “slumming” to upper 

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middle-class urbanites as they began or ended a glamorous evening with a drink, had shoes repaired while they sat on stools at a yakitoriya under the tracks, or found casual entertainment (buskers) or sex (tiny brothels) in the downscale leisure zones. These pocket spaces seemingly appeared and disappeared overnight, persisting especially in times when such informal arrangements were needed, such as in the immediate postwar era of black-market goods or during the influx of new migrant labor in the 1980s and 1990s. Sakariba, like cafés themselves, were places where the expectation of the predictable met the possibility of the novel. In this they might be both “village”—safely predictable—and “city”—where change and the unfamiliar are the only predictable elements. They give meaning to the urban experience as they fill in the gaps in time, space, and the functions of ordinary life and eventually create the demand and need for what they provide.  

 

 

Iki: Style Is More Than Skin-Deep Such sakariba denizens of the past partook of the mizushobai (literally, “water trades”) of the Edo period.34 The “watery” professions, as Liza Dalby notes, were fluid in many ways, and customers themselves were a flow from one place to another.35 Urban merchants and artisans were frequenters of such moving locations and themselves took on the coloring of the demimonde. They were sophisticated but not “jaded,” possessing iki, an unconventional and understated flair for art and feeling.36 As Dalby describes iki, “iki fused human emotion with aesthetic ideals, touching all the arts . . . and indeed, refashioning life itself into an artifact of taste.” 37 Iki, as one observer noted, had its own patterns but required transgression against them as well. The iki areas—the saka­ riba—were also where creative artifacts such as ukiyo-e art emerged in the seventeenth century, epitomizing street culture in images of actors playing Kabuki roles, layering art upon art. The artists themselves created another layer through their own appearances in sakariba—becoming themselves characters in the theater of those spaces. Leisure pursuits, then, often had a style transcending the time and space of the act itself, and occupied a significant part of the life of the person seriously pursuing the art of pleasure. The water trades were sociable ones, and clients were expected to be regular visitors, not always with erotic intent; they were chided for disloyalty if too much time elapsed between visits. Sometimes leisure is not restful. Knowing  

 

 

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and being known might engage a visitor in a game of acquaintance in which the persona might be donned as a mask, protecting both one’s other identities and the establishment—for knowing implies responsibility, which cannot be taken lightly. The “play” between anonymity and engagement was a delicate one, and intimacies implied by activities within the solatial space might not cross the threshold. Dichotomies of place thus are parallel to dualities of person, but “on duty” and “off duty” are not sufficient signifiers for the complex set of personae an urban person acquires. The saving grace of “not-seeing,” by which people can choose to ignore that which is not convenient to see, is not sufficient to protect participants from the multiple clashes of urban experience. The coffeehouse, itself a destination for leisure, might be a respite zone not only from the pressures of identity-conferring spaces such as home and work but also a retreat from the masking and engagements of mizushobai-like leisure activities and their requirements of performance. In the café, you need no mask at all; you can be a ghost—as one writer noted, a presence without a shadow. The ghost presences in cafés in mid to late twentieth-century Japan were very different from the flaneur apparitions of the Taisho and early Showa eras, those iki-­demonstrating, modernity- and urbanity-parading performances by the Japa­nese equivalents of the boulevardiers. In the cafés of the Japanese city, modernity, then, in another paradox, is noted by the absence of responsibility for its display. The popularity of coffee has risen continuously, though cafés have had periods of decline and recovery. At their peak in the 1980s, there were 154,680 cafés, with 575,768 employees, in Japan.38 There appears to be an inverse correlation between the state of the economy and the numbers of some types of cafés, as the most luxuriously decadent ones (such as the short-lived cafés of the 1980s boom period that served gold-leaf-flecked coffee) decline in hard times, but ordinary cafés seem to become stronger. These offer a legitimate place to go for the small luxury of a cup of good coffee and the solace of company or quiet.  

 

Café Culture and Society under the Lens Urban life has fewer detractors in Japan than in the West, in spite of the lack of obviously calming sites such as public parks and other restorative places common in Western cities. The public space that has made the discontinuities of urban life tolerable is the café, but it has served

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other functions as well, providing space for time out from one’s main responsibilities and places to make time work for the customer who fills gaps there, and allowing for activities not easily performed at home or workplace or school. Japanese coffee itself has now become a goal for café visitors, as the quality and performance of coffee in the Japanese café have scented it with seductive fragrance and made Japan a destination for world-class coffee pilgrims.39 Coffee places, as we have seen, are neither highly determined by purposefulness nor completely anomic vacuums. A café in Japan is not a “global space”—unless one counts the Seattle-based chain stores—nor is it usually a deeply local place, forbidding to newcomers. The fact that there is no singular model for the café and, over time, no heritage or tradition that drives the present shape and diversity of types of kissaten makes cafés both interesting and durable. The no-place place, the borrowed landscape, the well-side gathering place are all taglines for cafés we have studied, but new uses and shapes constantly appear. The very openness of definition, along with the cultural parameters of service and quality that make these places “Japanese” is the draw and preservative of the café in Japanese cities. The café in Japan contains a central contradiction, then: its cultural logic is strongly Japanese, but the experience of the café can break almost all the usual rules of being Japanese. The cultural logics include the intensity of attention to detail, what we have called the kodawari of coffee and café ownership. The young woman coffee crafter who would not answer the phone or acknowledge a new arrival while making a pour-over cup for a customer at the counter gave clear evidence of her priorities. The café master who showed the painful bulging veins in his legs had a self-punishing standard for customer service. Another aspect of cultural logic is the framing of the person in the café: freed of the responsibilities contained in his or her primary roles, the customer is offered an escape from social constraints and definitions of the person. The cultural logic is also evident in the customer who in her expectations for the service, skill, and hospitality reinforces their importance: it is she who silently demands these performances by her presence on the red velvet seat at the small dark wood table in the corner. In the contradiction itself, the café illustrates a profoundly important cultural dictate: the rules are there, the roles seem to define you rigidly, but dipping below the radar of accountability one finds a very Japanese compromise. That flexibility is also Japanese. The pressures of urban life include the daily shocks of movement and the wearing predictabilities  

 

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F igu r e 19. Interior of Hachi Hachi Infinity Café in Kyoto. Photograph by Kondo Minoru.

of bureaucratic workplaces. The demands of finely tuned performances for people in many categories, junior or senior, male or female, student or teacher, and many other scripted statuses and behaviors create stressful environments. But mitigating these pressures are gaps, points of slippage, unmarked spaces of the day, times-out from exacting demands. These are also expected and culturally confirmed and yet are discreetly offstage from the “official” sites of responsibility. Personal escapes are part of one’s regular life, but escape too has a Japanese coding. The café in Japan provides reassuring predictability, including the familiarity of a place of respite from “being Japanese” in other loci. The rigors of stratification and official performance are not really easy for anyone. The café helps a person negotiate the persnicketiness of bureaucratic life and the social straitjacket and allows for “accidental” freedom. It is inside cultural frames but outside social prescriptions. Ignoring inappropriate behavior or matters clearly not for public eyes or ears is a technique aimed at smoothing over what might otherwise be difficult socially. To the eye of the literalist observer, the principle of “notseeing” what is plainly out there is childishly transparent or possibly hypocritical. The paper shoji room separators in a traditional Japanese

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house obviously do not mask sound but, if you are in an adjacent room and hear private sounds, you are permitted or expected not to hear them. The unmarked moment, sound, behavior, or space is always to some degree marked in cultural terms or might be noticed as such by a visitor. The extent and type of marking in Japanese spaces varies: a garden is “Japanese” if it has a pond with a Japanese stone lantern. A railroad station will have seemingly acultural universally recognizable platform numbers, times, and destinations displayed, but there will be stalls selling supremely local bento boxes filled with foods for eating on the train. There are automated bows from a kimono-dressed mannequin at the door of a large discount department store. On the ATM machine screen in your bank, a bank-uniformed cartoon lady bows repeatedly as you receive your money from the dispensing slot, and Colonel Sanders, lifesize in fiberglass, stands outside a KFC shop in midsummer sporting a brightly patterned yukata for the summer festival. Such transcultural nods and bows produce ironic smiles from the visitor: they get attention because they seem to have acquired a local cultural glaze, an amusing discordance. At the café a modicum of “Japanese” behavior is expected—even without taking one’s shoes off. You are there not to notice things that may embarrass if noticed and you are to make yourself as unobtrusive as possible. There are few other demands; it is correct behavior stripped to its basics. You may be alone or in company, you may do something busily, or read, or just nod off. Far from being non-Japanese, countercultural, or “culture-free” sites, cafés are Japan reduced to core cultural signifiers. Coffee itself is both free of signifiers and full of culture. One respondent noted that coffee is “rational, even ascetic,” and another said that the café and the coffee taken together are banal, ordinary but also potentially exciting. It makes cultural sense there to be culturally undemanding; the café is Japanese in its all-but-anomic presence. Being free of some cultural prescriptions in a space available for time out is neither radical nor novel nor foreign; but in Japan, the freedom the café offers in the gap between official and actual, tatemae and honne, is as culturally delineated as the deepest bow.  

Chapter 8

Knowing Your Place

Along a small canal in the northern part of Kyoto, near a big art school, is a gallery café called Rihou. A remodeled older house with a vaulted ceiling and elegant modern wood furnishings, this gallery serves only one coffee a day; when he can get them, the owner prefers Ethiopian beans. There are quiet tables on the first floor and above, a gallery where rising artists show their work in well-publicized exhibitions. The owner, a connoisseur of coffee and art, keeps beautiful art books available for customers’ perusal. Very seldom do people convene here, but everyone who comes seems to partake of a common feeling. The master rarely speaks. Next door is a small house converted into Jumpei, another café-­gallery. The café seems in many ways like a home: customers take off their shoes to enter as one does entering a private domestic space. The master is a woman who makes everyone feel at home, and engages those who want to be engaged in friendly conversation. Around a long rectangular wood table people congregate for a time, kneeling on pillows or letting their legs drop into a shallow pit under the table. Those who aren’t known by anyone at the big table go to tables nearby—there are three or four small tables with chairs. But the big-table people come to be part of the central spirit of the place, built of small intimacies and ongoing conversations. And if you are a regular who hasn’t shown up, someone might call to see if you are all right. These two adjacent cafés are very different in mood—the more austere welcome of the beautiful Rihou café is  

 

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F igu r e 2 0. Rihou gallery café in Kyoto. Photograph by Kondo Minoru.

juxtaposed with the nurturant friendliness of the equally “artistic” café Jumpei—and indeed, they attract different clienteles within a very small segment of the café market. As writer Yoshimura Motoo notes, it is such uses of space (kukan) that make it a place (basho).1 The artists and writers, weavers and potters who convene at Jumpei work in solitude and sometimes need companionship, a community. Writers and artists who want unmarked space, often people whose work or family lives are dense with human inter­ action, would go to Rihou. Cafés serve all kinds of contemporary urban functions, providing space to some, place to others. Their currently most favored manifestation appears to be that of a no-place place—with enhancements suiting a more individual, less communal use of the café, depending of course on the demographic niche using the space. And even as this is marked as a “trend,” there are many other popular types clamoring for equal billing. One’s use of almost any café depends on one’s need of the moment: you, like the café, have many modes, and cafés in the aggregate allow you a range of options, choices, and diversity. While a particular kissaten can be one thing for some and another for others, and can suit different customers differently at different times of day, it can become “typed” for use and function.  

 

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Being a Different Self in a Different Place One man, in the sales division of his company, finds his position at the middle level one in which he must listen constantly to his superiors, and listen to his clients as well. When he goes to a café, he said, he needs a place to talk. He says things at the café that he can’t say to his bosses or workmates at the office—ideas about innovation, critical views of the world we live in. If he did say these things at work, he would be taken as “strange”; even his wife, he said, finds his ideas “dangerous” and warns him about talking this way in public settings. His ideas about human communication and social change seem to an outsider innocuous enough, but in the context of a Japanese organization, where predictability is more valuable and safe than innovation, he finds it hard to express any ideas at all. The café, he said, is the place where he can be this other self, the one who can communicate his real feelings, even if only to himself. For a boss, whose words are taken seriously at the office, the conversation at the kissaten is a relief. Here, he said, there is no emphasis on an object, a product, or any responsibility for the talk. Here your conversation is important, but not for any “goal.” A teacher, on the other hand, finds the café a place to listen: she teaches all day long, speaking and listening to students, and wants a chance to listen to others. For hardworking people who feel sometimes the meaninglessness of their daily jobs, the “real conversation” of the kissaten supports them: to them the café is the “real world.” The café where this teacher often goes, not far from Doshisha University in Kyoto, has an interesting group of “hobbyist intellectuals,” as she called them, people who speak their minds and in the exchanges themselves create new ideas. As a place where one might indulge fantasies or engage a hobby, the café fills definite needs in people’s lives. The café is not-work, not-home in its very definition as a place apart. Cafés are places where you are different from the way you must be elsewhere. A young man wildly garrulous at the café is silent at work; an older widower under the thumb of his daughter-in-law at home engages in good-humored barrages of invective at his kissaten; and a young housewife sits and draws cartoons for manga at a café during her children’s school hours. Café-sitting may replace that work with a new kind of focus. One retired man’s hobby, he said, is cafés themselves: he has a life list rather like that of a birdwatcher, but mornings find him always in the same one. This one, he says, is where he is off-duty, even from his hobby. It is not a “capture” for his list; he has no category for it. It is home base.  

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A hobby (shumi) in Japanese practice is undertaken quite as seriously as, and more passionately than, work itself. When a person declares that an activity is a hobby, he is saying both that it is a serious matter and that it is his choice, as well as that he will give as much of himself to it as possible. We have seen the owner of a café say that he left “work”— a salaried job—to pursue the hobby-dream of running his own kissaten. In his case, the hard work he spends on his feet and working late hours is mitigated by the fact of his love for the work—making it, he said, his hobby. Working hard at your favorite hobby is not a contradiction in Japan. These assiduous pursuits are “relaxation” because of their contrast to activities marked as “work” and because of the fact that they happen in a place marked for leisure. The “leisure” spaces themselves are not neutral: they contain form and cultures of their own, however much they speak to free time and relaxation.2 Leisure in Japan, as in any modern society, has multiple meanings and practices. In some, as in the notion of “hobby,” leisure can demand as much energy and commitment as what we would call “work.” Cultures of leisure include both “time out” and “time on” activities in Japan. Wandering aimlessly, with no obvious geographical destination, but in a performative mode—the flaneur activity of nonwork time—is a leisure activity we saw evident in the Taisho period, an aspect of new urban modernities. Travel as a leisure activity, with its preferred destinations, obligations, and performances, became similarly encultured shortly thereafter, when cosmopolitanism and the economic conditions that could support it demanded movement beyond the urbanities of Japan. The flaneur traveled in spaces where he was known and that he knew, the traveler to spaces where the challenges and pleasures of not being known were to be found. Leisure time could be spent in self-transformative ways (travel, painting lessons, etc.) and in self-restorative ways (reading, sitting in a garden, walking), and the meanings of such practices varied within the basically middle-class cultures in which they were valued. The demonstration of tastes in leisure activities is a reflection on the person who measures her ability to use the city and use its spaces. Atmosphere—the visible and sensory culture of a place—one woman said, is the chief reason she chooses a café; the taste of the coffee is secondary for her. She must have a place that is different from her home, and it must have sophistication: not glamour, but a reticent taste, a suggestion, minimalism as an escape from her cluttered home and office. She won’t go to Starbucks, she said, or any chain café because style repeated  

 

 

 

 

 

 

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becomes ordinary. Another person said that a Starbucks café provides only an “artificial relaxation”—a brand rather than depth, which you can find anywhere, which is nowhere, and relaxation to him is in a somewhere. For him, he said, relaxation is not the yoga kind in which you turn inward and remove yourself from the world; it is an activity that helps him better communicate with the world. Leisure may represent time off from obligations, but it can also have its functional aspects.  

Functions and Uses over Time The endurance of the café is an outcome of its availability, flexibility, and responsiveness to consumer and social needs. Cafés have diversified: market strategy requires proliferation of styles, as does the audience itself, changing and requiring distinctive settings for leisure. The essence remains but must be reduced to a greater generality as diverse uses and styles extend the category—from neighborhood hangout, home for philosophy and literature, to breakfast or lunch stop, to private “office,” to the library cafés used by high school students. The café in Japan has and will be a place for social and personal use, for respite as well as for education and for the extension of the person—and the community—into new realms of expression. In the 1880s the advent of the coffeehouse brought people interested in Western novelties together. The first, as we have seen, was the Kahiichakan, a novel place, free from old associations, but like the chaya it was male—though unlike the chaya the servers were male too. Social and political space, places of culture and education, the early coffeehouses opened up the possibilities of urban public spaces, which continued to proliferate and diversify. While not uniquely Japanese, cafés as they have evolved in Japan play out distinctive cultural features. The cafés and kissaten we have explored can be categorized historically by their “genetic” roots and antecedents, as well as by use and clientele. In chapter 3 we saw the historical development of kissaten from their Japanese and European influences to their present forms. The uses of cafés today represent an enormous diversification of the earlier patterns and functions. By the time the café became normal (as opposed to “foreign” or “elite” or otherwise exceptional) in people’s urban lives, it also had begun to represent the increasing diversity of their needs and experiences. Only when it took on “normality” could it also begin to fill those new needs and reflect the local, rather than a world in which the modern could mean only Western.  

 

 

 

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Up to that point, which occurred when “modernity” and “Westernization” began to take on separate meanings, cafés had been special places in the education of Japanese in Western ways. Bunmei kaika, “civilization and enlightenment,” were strongly associated in the Meiji era with Western ideas and practices and were seen as part of the bootstrapping enterprise of nation-state building. As we have seen, there was an official version of “Western culture,” which was embodied in the cultural space of the Rokumeikan, the pavilion where Western dress, music, and mores were on show at elite parties. There was also an intellectual version in which writers and scholars exchanged views and created new frames in social and philosophical life for ideas from the West. The social and intellectual elites, then, had their versions of bunmei kaika, but the ordinary people had fewer engagements. Tei Ei-kei, the founder of the first coffeehouse in Tokyo in 1888, had other ideas, as we saw: he wanted a social space where people from all walks of life could meet and discuss the ways in which Japan and the West might meet. The Kahiichakan, his coffeehouse created as an alternative to what he saw as the super­ ficialities of the Rokumeikan, was available and cheap enough for even students, but attracted—at the same price—the middle class men whose influence might be greater. And while it failed too soon, not because of its mission but because of its management, the Kahiichakan became the famous antecedent for both social and personal spaces of transformation. From places for “Western” experiences, coffeehouses gradually became places for modernity—Japanese modernity. And from the novelties of modernity, locally manifested forms, further transformations proliferated until, by the 1930s, the Japanese cafés had left their Westernizing precursors well behind. At this time, the kissaten was changing from a bourgeois male institution to both a generic and a specific type of gathering space—as we have seen, becoming Japanese meant becoming a range of things, from junkissa (the “pure,” coffee-only, serious discussion space) to the waitress café, where the distractions of waitresses and alcohol had become more evident than the coffee and the talk. From the junkissa came the kissaten as we know it, and from the waitress café the cabaret-dancehall-nightclub, which would decline during the run-up to World War II and would later be echoed in the postwar “entertainment” spaces of manga, “no-pants,” and other kinds of kissa catering to tastes in other trends besides coffee itself. From the antecedent kissaten come the whole range of coffeehouses from the places students gather either to work (benkyobeya) or to meet  

 

 

 

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F igu r e 21. Prinz gallery café and restaurant in Kyoto. Photograph by Kondo Minoru.

friends, to convivial neighborhood places where older retired men hang out, to places where toddlers’ mothers can talk while their children play in a toy-equipped area, to the virtual social-service cafés for elderly. In the several generations loosely called the “postwar,” the places we call coffee shops (koohii no mise) have proliferated into styles we might group into loosely organized types. The names I am offering for these types are only suggestions of observed uses, and they do not begin to describe the variants and options within each. With the usual caveats about generalization, then, I offer three families of cafés. Anabateki or the hole in the wall is a café especially suited to being alone, private in public. Such a café is often called kakurega (hidden place) and has the charm of the “undiscovered.” Obviously, one woman’s anabateki or space to hide is another’s kaffeeklatsch, but there is a calm, quiet feeling to the places most people choose as a coffee hermitage. They need not be small or picturesque, they could be nondescript and tucked away in a railroad station arcade. Anabateki is a use rather than a description. Idobata kaigi, the “well-side gathering place,” is a café where one might expect to find one’s friends or a community of like minds. In premodern agrarian villages, the common well was where women espe-

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cially could grab a minute of chat while they filled their buckets in their round of chores, away from the scrutiny of their mothers-in-law. These cafés are bright and often female-run, and there might be a common large table as well as smaller ones. Shakkei, “borrowed landscape”: the concept of shakkei is known in garden design in Japan. It describes the situating of viewpoints where a person might glimpse distant features of landscape outside the garden, such as hills, mountains, or temples, which lend their attractions to grace the foreground. In a café context, shakkei is used to describe the experience in a place where there is a scene of interest, like a garden to view through a window, drawing people into the café for time out as well as for an aesthetic object of contemplation. In any of these, of course, one could be alone or in communication with others; in any one might be private in public or there for completely arbitrary reasons—such as the fact that one was caught in the rain or waiting for an appointment or tired from shopping or other pursuits. In keeping with its protean malleability, no coffeehouse is so rigidly delineated as to exclude undefined uses of the space.  

Atopia: The No-Place Anabateki “I brought a friend once to the café I go to when I want to be alone. No one I know ever goes there, and I don’t tell anyone about it. Even though I have never spoken to the master, he seems to recognize me. But when I brought a friend, I could imagine him thinking, That girl is so talkative and noisy; she’s not the same person who always comes here. I made a mistake: I have to find another place now to be alone.” A college student, Osaka. “The master said, ‘Why do you always sit there by yourself at the table? Come to the counter next time and talk with us.’ I thought, Yes, I want to be part of that happy circle, but now when I have quiet work to do, I can’t bring it to that café anymore.” A research assistant, Kyoto. “If you are alone, please sit at the big table with the others; the small tables are for two or more people.” A café server to an office worker in a small Tokyo café. “If you are working, don’t do it on the yuka [veranda].” A manager to a student in a Starbucks coffee shop, Kyoto. “I can work only two hours at that café.” A student at a library café, Tokyo. Often in interviews the word anabateki arose when a person referred

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to a favorite kissaten or café. The idea of anabateki (literally, a hole-like place) is a place one can go to hide away from the complications of daily life. It is a secret place—or at least it is a place only you among your friends know—as in the first quote above, a place one doesn’t reveal to others. Of course, that place is “known,” but it is not a place where one’s own circle shows up—it is a nonplace to them, and you would want to keep it that way. It is a place that makes no demands on you. The complications of kissaten life arise when the social and personal frames collide. Being alone in a café, as we have seen, has positive value. It is a place where one needn’t fear solitude, where solitude in fact can be the point. It is also a place where one can bring work to do at the table or a book to read. There are contradictions too in the image cast by the owner—does she want the place to be a salon, a place for people to meet and communicate, a gathering place—or a place where it is safe to be invisible and to work quietly? In much of Japanese life, being alone is either difficult or a concern for others. A young person in his room facing the screen of the computer too long might be seen as otaku—the solitude leading to perversity. The child without a nakama—a friendship group at school—would have a serious problem in the teacher’s eyes. Solitude, while valued poetically, is suspect socially. The person too much alone is seen as nekura—dark, solitary in a negative sense, possibly dangerous. Being alone, though, is important, as we have seen, and yet one keeps that need to oneself. In the interstices of physically and socially crowded lives, solitude has value, but too much might trip the balance. This contradiction in contemporary Japanese life is partly resolved by keeping a balance between work and leisure, social and personal space and time. While people can be protected from the all-too-present possibility of invasive interference from others by the practice of “not-seeing,” the almost unconscious denial of things that if seen would be uncomfortable or worse, it is still necessary to avoid the critical gaze of the seken, the watchful community presence. One older man said that in his thinwalled family house and thin-skinned neighborhood you needed to be strategic. Living cheek-by-jowl as people did, he said, you survived by pretending that you didn’t see and hear difficult things, things that flew in the face of public approval. Being acceptable in Japan is complicated and demands more sophisticated efforts than the counterpart understandings in the West would take. Social life is hard work. Instead of taking on the role of the seken, the contemporary kissaten for the most part is a place where, within the parameters of basic acceptable behav 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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ior, little counts. What happens in the kissaten stays there. Sometimes it is a relief not to be in the matrix. The young woman who reported that she had ruined her anabateki café for herself by bringing someone there mourned the fact that she had broken the spell by introducing a social moment to a private space. What she was really upset about, however, was not that she had ruined it for herself but that she had tampered with the image of her place there, in a vaguely defined relationship with the man who had been making coffee for her for months, by bringing in a foreign body. Her imagined problem, however, was real enough—her sensitivity was probably accurate. There is something precious about a place where you are safe in the persona—or the nonpersona—you have brought to the table, where it will change only if you change it. Of course she could go back alone anytime: it is a public space, after all. Of course she could bring a friend again. But the reason to go to such an out-of-the-way space is not a social one. There are plenty of places to go for a chat, but a place that “only I know” is carefully sought. An anabateki café for one person is another’s social space, but the cafés and stalls (yatai) under the railroad tracks are almost always for people who want solitude as they wait for a train or kill time before or after work. In Osaka, where there are kissaten of all kinds, many anabateki cafés are literally underground. At Shin-Umeda, where there are corridors of shops and restaurants underneath the station, men especially go to such coffeehouses, mostly chain places where the shop’s anonymity guarantees yours. In chain stores the help are usually fairly transient arubaito—students in part-time work—who are not likely to remember you. And in the consumer complexes of stations in Japan, being anonymous is almost a given. Department stores, railroad stations, and hotel lobbies are places of accidental engagement rather than social destinations, and if, as in the case of Osaka, they are also places where excellent coffee is served, they are even more attractive to the solitary drinker. One respondent, a fifty-year-old businessman, said that it is only in Osaka where you can find both the anonymous space and the good coffee—in other cities, for anonymity you would have to go to Doutor (an inexpensive Japanese chain), but the coffee is not good there, he said. The master in the second quote above who asked the customer to join the chatty crowd at the counter calculated that the customer wanted to be part of the circle; his calibration of her mood had to be right or he’d lose her. Also, the charm of that place lay in the desire the master created—everyone would want to be in his nakama. So there was nothing  

 

 

 

 

 

 

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discordant in his request. And yet the visitor also wanted to return to this friendly café to work, using its social cheer as a kind of social “borrowed landscape” with just enough distraction in it to help her focus on her work. In the third quote, a very popular morning kissaten, near a taxi stand and tourist bus parking area, must maximize the use of tables by drivers and locals and chooses to do it with the unintended side effect of social engineering. The effect of being with other people who have come alone is to mark more strongly the distance between them. Knowing that people can manage their own personal space (in Japan people are very conscious of the need to judge precisely the physical space they can call theirs), the manager can count on the customers at the large table not to spread their newspapers, not to put bags on the table, and not to take more space than they need. In addition, because they are not there for social reasons, the manager figures that they will leave more quickly than those with friends. Customers will come because they want the coffee, the morning breakfast set, or a place to sit for a bit until business calls them elsewhere. These are not long-term sojourners at this hour of the day, and when a solo customer comes at a less busy time, he can sit anywhere. The next quote is a high school student’s report of an injunction by a manager of a Starbucks café. This café’s location is privileged: it is in Kyoto on the bank of the Kamo River, where the traditional restaurants and teahouses have yuka hanging out over the river bank, breezy and cool in the summer afternoons. Starbucks has one too, introducing ironies about the use of the space. Yuka are places of relaxation and leisure, places to be social—scarcely anabateki places. And yet Starbucks is a favorite place to go for solitary sitting, where especially young people bring schoolwork to do. A student-haunted café is sometimes called a benkyobeya (study hall), and some provide reference books and even rent desks with all amenities by the hour. One does not imagine in such a space the jollity of a gathering or party—the events for which yuka were traditionally intended. The manager appears to want an atmosphere of leisure even in a chain store, and told the young woman working with a text and a dictionary to take her work inside, where she could not distort his preferred vision of the place. In the last quote, concerning another benkyobeya use of a café, we hear a high school girl saying that her work time there is limited to two hours; the manager has told her that she must leave after that. It is a bookstore chain, and in this case, the manager is worried less about  

 

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image than he is about the economics of long-staying students as customers. They buy a single drink and take up table space. The use of the café as benkyobeya is better managed at some chain stores than at local independents, where in any case the coffee might be more expensive or the mood less youthful. Home is crowded, too engaged, especially if family members are present, and even libraries have been known to tell students that they can stay only if they are reading the library books, not if they are doing homework or working on computers they’ve brought. This young girl’s mother cooperates in the program by bringing her to the café, promising the manager she will pick her up two hours later. Japanese cafés are seen to offer much, but occasionally, as above, to be quirky about the offerings and their parameters. As spaces, the cafés offer both utopian and atopian virtues: the utopian good place includes everything you might want in a destination, reflecting on your taste and identity, while the atopian no-place needs no identity and demands none of you. The best no-place, then, is a chain coffee shop: you can go from one to another, you are not recognized, the experience is completely socially neutral, made devoid of meaning as an anomic space—or full of a contained and predictable meaning in which you are safely no one. If the anabateki café is a place to hide away, the chain café is a place to be publicly private.  

Idobata Kaigi: Mister Donut and the Friendship Group Being where you know you’ll find companionship that is more than part of the background for being alone leads you to the cafés where there are regular gatherings of friends—or people who may not know your name but know you by the seat you take or the hour when you arrive. This kaffeeklatsch atmosphere gives some cafés the character of those who gather there—such as the artists’ and craftsmen’s haunt, Jumpei, and Café Rihou, in the Kita-Shirakawa area of Kyoto where this chapter began. The regular customer sometimes but not always knows the others outside the walls of the café, but the people who gather have a common interest. The “well-side gathering” groups of students, however, are more likely to gather in a less pricey space such as the Mister Donut shop on Ima­ degawa nearby, where the hours are long, the coffee is inexpensive, and everyone knows to show up there. One student said she prefers a place  

 

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where no one is uncomfortable about how much it costs, and where there is no “master” whose presence might inhibit a free and sometimes rowdy use of the place. Unlike the owners of Rihou or Jumpei, who are engaged in the cultural lives of the artists or at least in the world of art, the employees at Mister Donut do not engage; they are merely young arubaito part-timers serving coffee from an urn or machine. You won’t see many trying to study here; for study the same students will be found at other times at places like Shinshindo, an old café near Kyoto University where at long trestle tables people are reading, taking notes, and talking quietly over the work. No cell phones can be used there, while at Mister Donut it seems anyone who comes alone has one pasted to his ear or is texting furiously. Everyone knows to show up there after 4:00 p.m., when friends begin to gather. As in the coffee shops where elderly gather, these friends will begin to worry if one of their number hasn’t shown up for a few days, and someone will track that person down. This “community” doesn’t derive of course from the interactions between owners and customers; the customers bring their networks with them when they come. Cafés also suit elderly people for idobata kaigi. With slightly more pocket money the older café dwellers inhabit “traditional” kissaten, which might not be old ones but newer ones as well that have taken on the mantle of nostalgia. The self-service chain cafés do not in general please older people, who prefer good service at the table. They also like less “anonymous” spaces: they will choose one and return often so as to have a regular presence there, either to witness or to form relationships. They want a place to relax and for them, often isolated even in the extended family or living alone, it is a chance to feel part of a community. Marketers map the spending habits of older people and find that they, unlike their parents, have grown up spending at least a little regularly on leisure and entertainment, and they are not likely to stop— especially as they now have more time for it. This sort of café, one commentator said, is always supported by regular customers—it is “classic” and welcoming. He noted that the “dankai generation”—the baby-boomer front wave—has begun to retire and that they are key to the future of kissaten. “What retirees, especially retired men, need is the ibasho (a place to be). The kissaten will be seen as a place to relax, a place to associate with people.” 3 Many recall moments of connection in cafés. Morimoto Reo, now in his late sixties, said the communication of a café was very important: “At Roba (in Koenji, Tokyo) I met with actors, singers, and all of my colleagues,  

 

 

 

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and we enjoyed talking a lot about drama, movies, jazz, painting, and philosophy. We often talked till dawn. For me then going to a kissaten was just like going abroad; it was a place where we could talk across cultures.” 4

Shakkei Cafés: Reflected in the Borrowed Landscape of a Coffeehouse The idea of shakkei as a type came to one café-goer as she discussed kinds of cafés she frequents. This middle-aged Japanese woman found that she prefers places that set a scene or where there is a feeling of “place,” with a deliberate design or a setting that takes advantage of existing scenery, whether it is a small garden out the window, as at Tsuta, Koyama-san’s café in Minami Aoyama in Tokyo (see chapter 4), or a view from the hilltop over Kyoto in the former teahouse Mo-An. A gallery café can be such a place, where the art itself is a place-setter. Sometimes, she said, it is the people who frequent a café who are the scenery, by their character and distinction. Or it can be the music, as we have seen in chapter 3, that gives the place a sense of setting. The “sepia” cafés described earlier offer another kind of shakkei— it is a borrowed past landscape that brings people to sit at these older places. Morimoto Reo, cited above, makes visits regularly to such cafés: “I go back to the past, walking about ten minutes [from his home] to Nanatsumori. This door, the same as thirty years ago, welcomes me. . . . These days I don’t come to see my friends but there is a kind of warmth, the warmth offered by an old shop. On the old chairs with ripped leather, I can feel the warmth of past customers who once sat here.” 5  

Coffee and the kissaten are indissolubly joined; anything else the kissaten provides designates the place as a place to return to, but it is the coffee by which the independent café in Japan sinks or swims in the shrinking economy. The café or kissaten must provide motivation for the customer’s return in both the brew and the atmosphere. No one comes back to a café that does not suit his taste in both senses— though of course his mood may vary and with that mood, the choice of a café for a specific sojourn. One café owner said that her customers may come for the coffee, but “a new face should develop a relationship with the café little by little—then it is beautiful. The atmosphere of this kissaten can naturally melt into his everyday life.” The “romance” of the relationship with the café seems to have a par 

 

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F igu r e 22. Mo-An café, a former teahouse in Kyoto. Photograph by Kondo Minoru.

ticularly Japanese sensibility. It reflects a wabi-sabi aesthetic, an alonetogether feeling, and seems to encompass a pleasant, shadowy, minorkey melancholy—as in the poetic epigraph to chapter 7—and the bright high of communion with friends. The café crosses some lines permitting what might otherwise be unacceptable moods—the darkness of being alone in public, which might be suspect but is acceptable in these unscripted public spaces. The “romance” of darkness lies very near the surface in Japan, intriguing and repelling. There may be other kinds of psychosocial motivations: when the world is too much with you, the café provides a place to hide; it can be a place where being with unknown others does not represent invasion of one’s privacy. We might ask what sorts of cafés will be welcome in the coming decades. Cafés have, as we have seen, always provided for the needs of every era of customers. Will the future cafés, rendered outdated by cell phones, computers, and canned coffee, be only for older people wanting company and the memories of the kissa of their youth? At the rock bottom of reasons, a café is just where it is okay to go when there’s nothing else, where it is okay to sit, be alone, a last resort or an easy stop, a place to meet. While we have seen that the uses of a café have changed over time, and reflect the changing patterns of people’s lives, the basic need for off-duty space is not likely to disappear.  

 

 

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What would change, or is changing, that might sideline the café/kissaten, take it out of people’s lives? Won’t people always need the urban space, itself an important sideline that helps people maintain their balance in face of the demands of their busy and engaged lives? The café avoided dissolution—it was not a fad of a moment—by providing social and personal functions relevant to every period. The coffeehouse survives, I suggest, not because of global marketing strategies or because the coffee industry fills a bottomless cup. It persists because of local and personal reasons for its use. If you have no reason not to go there, you will go.  

 

Visits to Cafés: An Unreliable Guide

This postlude allows the reader who visits Japan an opportunity to pay calls on some cafés I have explored in the research for this book. There is no guarantee that they will all be available, but since some have persisted for almost a century, at least some are likely to be open.

Tok yo Kafe do Ramburu (Café de l’Ambre). Sekiguchi Ichiro, now (in 2011) 98, still presides in this highly principled shop near Ginza in Shinbashi. Sekiguchi opened the shop in 1948 using Indonesian beans that had been stored for shipment to Germany before the war. Specializing in old beans (such as Cuban 1974s and Colombian 1989s) roasted to order, Sekiguchi has an idiosyncratic, demanding style and has been called a koohiimaniakku (coffee maniac), but the coffee is indeed worth the visit. Ginza 8–10–15, Tokyo; phone 03/3751– 1551; www.h6dion.ne.jp/~lambre. Open Mon.–Sat. noon–10:00 p.m.; Sun and holidays noon–7:00 p.m.  

 

 

 

 

 

Café Paulista. Established in 1908 in Ginza, the oldest remaining coffeehouse. Named for São Paulo, Brazil, by its owner, Mizuno Ryu, who promoted coffee with the assistance of the Brazilian government, which sent him one hundred bags of free coffee annually. Famed for association with artists, writers, and literati of the Taisho era. Ginza 8–9, Chuo-ku, Tokyo; phone 03/3572–6160; www .paulista.co.jp. Open Mon–Sat 8:30 a.m. to 10:30 p.m.; Sun noon–8:00 p.m.  

 

 

 

Tsuta. Koyama-san has run this café for most of his adult life and hopes now that his son may succeed him. The café is peaceful and “sepia-toned” in a timeless style of dark furnishings and soft light. It is in Minami-Aoyama, adja173

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cent to Aoyama Gakuin, a famous women’s university. His café is featured in chapter 4. 5–11–20 Minami Aoyama Minato-ku, Tokyo; phone 03/3498–6888. Open Mon.–Fri. 10:00 a.m.–10:00 p.m.; Sat. noon–8:00 p.m.; Sun. closed.  

 

 

 

 

 

Bear Pond. Two locations allow visitors to take the best espresso of Tokyo in two styles—funky neighborhood or chic downtown. The original, in ShimoKitazawa, is worth the trek for its cozy minimalism, and there most likely you will have your espresso drawn by the master himself, Katsu Tanaka, who worked in coffee in the United States for many years, as a trainer and barista. The newer shop is in Shibuya, central and very industrial-chic. Shimo-Kitazawa main store: 2–36–12 Kitazawa Setagaya-ku, Tokyo 155–0031; phone 03/5454– 2486; e-mail [email protected]. Open Wed.–Mon. 10:00 a.m.–6:30 p.m.; closed on Tue. Shibuya branch: 1–17–1 Shibuya Shibuya-ku, Tokyo, 150– 0002. Open daily 9:00 a.m.–6:00 p.m.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Café de Naniwaya. Seems much older than it is; founded in 2006. The handpour method is methodically engaged here, as beans are ground at ordering and the temperature of the water is exactingly managed. Here you might order your first coffee jelly, a dish invented in Japan in the Taisho era. 1–7–5 Asakusa, Taito-ku, Tokyo; phone 03/5828–8988; http://asakusa-naniwaya.com. Open Wed.–Mon. 11:00 a.m.–11:00 p.m.; closed Tue.  

 

 

 

 

Café Ginza West. This beautiful café serves European pastries and coffee or Western tea in a peaceful, classic setting. White tablecloths, uniformed servers, and antique furniture have graced the space since 1947. This café offers free green tea in a handleless cup for sipping while you make your choice from the coffee menu. Ginza 7–3–6, Chuo-ku, Tokyo; phone 03/3571–1554. Open Mon.–Fri. 9:00 a.m.–11:00 p.m.; Sat., Sun., and holidays 11:00 a.m.–8:00 p.m.  

 

 

 

 

 

K yoto Mo-An. In northern Kyoto, not far from Imadegawa (a ten-minute walk at most) but far from the congestion of urban Kyoto, on a hiking trail on Yoshidayama near Yoshida-jinja, sits this most beautiful place to drink coffee. It is a converted teahouse, originally built in the late Taisho era, with exposed beams and simple, clean furnishings. They make wonderful set lunches to accompany coffee and other beverages. The cutlery, pottery, and glassware are made by local artists. On a summer afternoon, the views over Kyoto, including spectacular hills, are as lovely as on a winter day in the snow. The first time you find it will be magical, and the next time you will take another person so it will be magical for him. Kyoto Sakyo-ku, Yoshida-jinja; phone 075/761–2100. Open daily 11:30 a.m.–6:00 p.m.; lunch served until 2:00 p.m.  

 

Shinshindo. In northern Kyoto, on Imadegawa-doori. Opened in 1930 by Tsuzuki Hitoshi, a poet, who went to France to learn to make bread. He sold bread and coffee at the café, which he designed to imitate a student café in France. In World War II the café was an air-raid shelter, and during the student

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protests of the late 1960s students set up barricades to protect the café from Molotov cocktails being thrown along Imadegawa-doori. It is now much quieter. Large rectangular tables and bench seating were made by a famous carpenter, Kuroda Tatsuaki. In a small courtyard are tables and chairs for clement-weather seating. Close to the north gate of Kyoto University, Shinshindo is the site for study and academic conversation. 88 Oiwakechoi, Shirakawa, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto; phone 075/701–4121. Open Fri.–Wed. 8:00 a.m.–6:00 p.m.; closed Thu.  

 

 

Kafekosen (Factory Café). A challenge to find, but one of the most interesting places to drink excellent coffee in Kyoto. From the southeastern corner of Imadegawa and Kawaramachi, walk south along Kawaramachi past a Mister Donut. Cross a small street. On the left soon after that will be a nondescript building with an even less-descript ground-floor hallway. There will be bicycles along the hallway. Go down the dingy hall and up the stairs to the second floor. Walk past some studios and empty rooms to a room on the right where you can see a Fuji coffee roaster, bare wood floors, and some goods on shelves, including large bags of coffee beans. At the opposite side of the room is a counter where Sa-Chan makes fabulous one-at-a-time cups of coffee. She will give you a map drawn on a small wooden board. This shows you what coffees from where are on offer today. Watch her every move as she makes your coffee. Above her on the wall behind is a photo poster of Fidel Castro playing golf with his bearded buddies. To the left you will see racks of hanging bicycles: this is not just a wonderful coffee place, it is also a bike repair shop. I love this place. As you see from the directions, it’s a bit obscure: 448 Kajiicho, Kamigyoku, Kyoto; phone 075/211–538. Hours subject to change, but midmorning is safe.  

Hanafusa. On Marutamachi at the eastern end, where it ends at Shirakawa, just before the gas station as you come east, is an old siphon coffee shop. The siphon making is splendid to watch as a vacuum is created over a spirit flame and then, removed from heat, the vacuum breaks and the coffee above flows down through the glass pipe into the bulbous glass receptacle below. Hanafusa opened in the mid 1950s and is a favorite of older men, cabdrivers, and myself. The gentlemen who make the coffee ask you what body and depth you prefer before they craft your cup. There is no particular atmosphere. People like the simplicity—the diligence in an ordinary space. Open daily 7:00 a.m.–2:00 a.m.  

 

Kissa Soiree. In central Kyoto, a bit north of Shijo-doori on Kiyamachi, parallel to the Kamogawa River. Designed by a famous painter, Togo Seiji, this atmospheric café opened in 1948 but its design resonates with older, Taishoperiod fittings. It is bathed in blue light, the paintings are by Togo himself, and service is in European porcelain. Nishikiya-machi Shijo noboru, Shimogyo-ku, Kyoto-city; phone 075/221–0351.  

François (Furansoa). In central Kyoto just south of Shijo-doori on Kiyamachi. Café culture in Europe of the 1920s influenced the owner, Tateno Shoichi, who

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opened this café in 1934. Tateno was an art student and labor movement leader who opened this café to promote art and socialism. He named it François after Jean-François Millet. Classical music is played on old records and the stained glass windows make the place feel churchlike. Nichikiyamachi-doori-Shijokudaru, Shimogyoo-ku, Kyoto; phone 075/351–4042. Open Tues.–Sat. 10:00 a.m.–11:00 p.m.; closed Mon.  

 

 

Ambient Café Mole. In central Kyoto. Gokoomachi-doori, a little north of Oike-doori. The “ambience” comes from a virtual forest of potted trees and plants. The owner, Tomochika, says, “I like it to be known only to those who know”; but finding it is not difficult and the welcome to newcomers is sincere. He plays “ambient” Brazilian, jazz, swing, etc. and serves a wonderful chai as well as coffee. He tries to provide organic offerings. 424 Gokoomachi-Nijosagaru, Nakagyo-ku, Kyoto; phone 075/256–2038; http://cafemole.web.fc2.com. Open Thu.–Tue. 11:30 a.m.–6:00 p.m.; closed Wed.  

 

 

Lush Life. In northern Kyoto. This small jazz café, really only a counter, is opposite Demachiyanagi station in a small enclave of shops and restaurants. The owners, Saki Tetsuya and his wife, Michiyo, have managed this café since 1988 but have owned several jazz kissa previously. They have a fine daily curry rice as well as coffee. Coffee and curry have been paired in wharfside sailors’ coffeehouses in London—and here since before the war. In summer, there is an outdoor table as well, but then you cannot hear the music. Next to the taxi rank, across the road from Demachiyanagi station; phone 075/781–0199. Open Wed.–Mon. noon–midnight; closed Tue.  

 

 

 

Tsukiji. Café Tsukiji has no relation to the world’s largest fishmarket, in Tokyo. It was built in 1934 and entertained literati such as Tanizaki Junichiro, who refreshed themselves on the red velvet seats in this Viennese-style café. In the center of Kyoto, it is tucked away on the first side street north of Shijo–doori off Kawaramachi. The music in the air would be Mozart, and the pastries accompanying your Kaffe Wien, Viennese. Shijo-Kawaramachi Agaru, Higashi-iru Nakagyoku, Kyoto; phone 075/221–1053. Open daily 11:00 a.m.–11:00 p.m.  

 

 

Otafuku. In central Kyoto. Just a few steps south off Shijo-doori, near Taka­ shimaya department store, on your left you will see a sign with a smiling female mask, the otafuku character from Kabuki theater. In the basement is Otafuku, the café. If you sit at the counter, Noda-san will introduce you to others there. The coffee is made one cup at a time, individually dripped in perfect spirals over the grounds. Noda-san gets his beans from Tanaka Coffee, just north of Imadegawa on Horikawa. The style and precision this man brings to each cup must be seen. Noda-san also makes coffee at a stand at the Chionji handcraft fair on the 15th of every month near Hyakumanben. Bambi. A cabbie’s dream breakfast and excellent coffee, prepared by the master roaster who roasts in his shop nearby as his son and daughter in law make fabulous waffles—maple and red bean—and wonderful French toast as well  

 

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as other trucker-size breakfast treats. Just at the foot of the road (Ginkaku-ji michi) leading up to Ginkaku-ji, this café also serves the bus drivers who bring tourists for their hour or so of temple viewing. Prinz. About a five-minute walk from Kyoto’s largest art school is a very arty café/restaurant/inn and gallery. Prinz is very Bauhaus, furnishings and temperament—coolest spaces for looking at art or listening to music or drinking coffee. The outdoor patio is very serene. Takahara-cho, Tanaka 5, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto; phone 075/712–3900; www.prinz.jp. Open Mon.–Thu. 8:00 a.m.–midnight; Fri.–Sun. 8:00 a.m.–midnight.  

 

 

 

 

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Ryugetsudo. Across from Demachiyanagi station. A classical music café from 1950. You promise not to speak, which allows you into the “concert” room, where thousands of LPs await your choice. You may bring a pastry up from the bakery below, but you must unwrap it in the anteroom so as not to disturb customers. 5–1 Shimoyanagi-machi, Tanaka, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto; phone 075/781– 5162. Open daily noon–9:00 p.m.; holidays, 10:00 a.m.–9:00 p.m.  

 

 

 

efish. Located on the Kamogawa River with nice views from the floor-to-ceiling windows. This café is also something of a gallery of modernist design, having been the home of designer Nishibori Shin, whose objects are on display (and for sale) in the spacious rooms. By day a restful café and lunch spot, by night efish is a trendy bar. 798–1 Nishi Hashizuma-cho, Kiyamachi-doori, Gojo-sagaru, Kyoto; phone 075/361–3069; www.shinproducts.com. Open daily 11:00 a.m.– 10:00 p.m.  

 

 

Hachi Hachi Infinity Café. This, like Mo-An, is well worth the effort to find, and it is something of a mystery the first time. I owe this one to Michael Lambe, who described it on his Web site, Deep Kyoto. Its own Web site has a map. Yokota-san, whose small rustic house is also the café and bread bakery, has learned breadmaking from Austrian and German breadmakers, and his bread is the finest in Kyoto, if not farther. He uses only natural yeast (in the air) and organic flours and seeds. It is expensive if you think of it as ordinary bread, but it keeps and slices thinly and is wonderful. You sit in his living room, on tatami flooring at a low, long table, and on cool days cover your legs with special kotatsu quilts. His coffee and teas are fine too, as are his openface sandwich lunches and soups, daily specials. You must go. 506 Sanno-cho, Kamigyo-ku, Kyoto; phone 075/451–8792; www.hachihachi.org.  

Notes

Ch a p t er 1. Coffee in Public 1.  From 2008 data, Japan (6,881,000 bags) is third after the United States (24,280,000) and Germany (19,830,000) in consumption, but fourth after Italy in total imports. The first three largest importers are re-exporters, selling processed coffee overseas. A bag is about 60 kg of beans. 2.  Gus Rancatore, communication December 28, 2010. 3.  Places where coffee is served are called by different names, varying over time and by customary usage. The Kahiichakan—the first coffeehouse in Japan, opened in 1888—used the word kahii to mean “coffee,” which changed in the early twentieth century to koohii. Chakan was an older term for a place where tea might be served, somewhat more formal than a casual roadside chaya. In its time, the Kahiichakan came to represent the English-style coffeehouse, and its descendants then were koohiihausu. Very soon in the early twentieth century, Brazilian and Parisian influences created “cafés,” which were in style and service very different from the persisting coffeehouses, and yet they served koohii, which had become standard usage for the beverage itself by the early 1900s and remains so today. The word kissaten is commonly used to refer to independent coffeehouses, its characters reflecting the older use of the character for “tea” in Kahiichakan and other places of refreshment. In this book I will use café, coffeehouse, and kissaten all but interchangeably, except to note where they diverge in local meaning. 4.  Iwabuchi Koichi, Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism (Raleigh-Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002). 5.  Richard Dyck, personal communication, Tokyo 2008. 6. Takada Tamotso, “Kankoohi bunkaron [Theory of Coffee Culture],” in Koohii to iu Bunka, Tokyo: Kodansha International (Tokyo: Shibata Shoten, 1994), p. 68; in Japanese.  

 

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7.  Donald Richie, The Inland Sea (Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press, 2002). 8.  Ian Messer, “Japan’s Coffee Shops Spill Over,” Bloomberg News, May 21, 2003. 9.  Merry White, Perfectly Japanese (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 10.  Its address was Nishi Kuromoncho 2-ban, which is now mapped as Ueno Hirokoji, 1–1–10 Ueno, Taitou-ku. 11.  Hoshida Hiroshi, Nihon Saisho no Koohiiten: Kahi Chakan no Rekishi (Tokyo: Inabo Shobo, 1988), p. 52; and see also Hatsuda Tooru, “The Modernity of the Downtown: Consumptive Space in Urban Tokyo,” in Hankagai no Kindai (Tokyo: Toshi Tokyo no Shouhikukan). 12.  Gus Rancatore, communication; Bryant Simon, Everything but the Cup: Learning about America from Starbucks (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). 13.  Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces” (1967), Architecture, mouvement, continuité (October 1984). 14. Donald Shively, “The Social Environment of Tokugawa Kabuki,” in Nancy G. Hume, ed., Japanese Aesthetics and Culture: A Reader (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), pp. 193–211. 15.  Donald Shively, “Sumptuary Regulation and Status in Early Tokugawa Japan,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 25 (1965): 123–134. 16.  Marius Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan (Cambridge Mass.: Belknap Press, 2000), chap. 14: “Meiji Culture.” 17.  Ezra Vogel, “Kinship Structure, Migration to the City and Modernization,” in R. P. Dore, ed., Aspects of Social Change in Modern Japan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967), pp. 91–111. 18.  Kobakura Yasuyoshi, in Ryoori Okinawa Monogatari (Tokyo: Sakuinsha, 1983), p. 10.  

 

 

 

 

Ch a p t er 2. Ja pa n’s C a fés 1.  Bryant Simon, Everything but the Coffee: Learning about America from Starbucks (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). 2.  Jakob Norberg, “No Coffee,” Eurozine (August 28, 2008); repr. from Fronesis, 24 (2007). 3.  Ralph Hattox, Coffee and Coffeehouses: The Origins of a Social Beverage in the Medieval Near East (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1985). Books about coffee itself abound . In preparing this chapter, I also referred to the following: Stewart Lee Allen, The Devil’s Cup: Coffee, the Driving Force in History (New York: Soho Press, 1999); Kenneth Davids, Coffee: A Guide to Buying, Brewing and Enjoying (New York: St. Martins Press, 2001); H. E. Jacob, Coffee: The Epic of a Commodity (New York: Viking Press, 1935); Norman Kolpas, A Cup of Coffee: From Plantation to Pot (New York: Grove Press, 1993); Corby Kummer, The Joy of Coffee (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997); Mark Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World (New York: Basic Books, 1999); Francis B. Thurber, Coffee from Plantation to Cup (New York; Trow’s Printing, 1881); Bennett Alan

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Weinberg and Bonnie K. Bealer, The World of Caffeine: The Science and Culture of the World’s Most Popular Drug (New York: Routledge, 2002); Michaele Weissman, God in a Cup: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Coffee (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2008). 4.  Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community (New York: Marlowe, 1989). 5. Hattox, Coffee and Coffeehouses, p. 164; Jacob, Coffee, pp. 153–154. 6. Pepys, Diaries, cited in Hattox, Coffee and Coffeehouses, p. 178. 7. “A proclamation for the suppression of coffee houses: Whereas it is most apparent that the multitude of Coffee Houses of late years set up and kept within this Kingdom . . . and the great resort of idle and disaffected persons to them, have produced very evil and dangerous effects; as well for that many tradesmen and others, do herein misspend much of their time, which might and probably would be employed in and about their Lawful Calling and Affairs; but also for that in such houses . . . divers, false, malitious, and scandalous reports are devised and spread abroad to the Defamation of His Majesty’s Government, and to the disturbance of the Peace and Quiet of the Realm; his Majesty hath thought it fit and necessary, that the said Coffee Houses be (for the Future) put down and suppressed”; quoted in Markman Ellis, The Coffeehouse: A Cultural History (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2004), p. 86. 8. “It is disgusting to notice the increase in the quantity of coffee used by my subjects, and the amount of money that goes out of the country as a consequence. Everybody is using coffee; this must be prevented. His Majesty was brought up on beer, and so were both his ancestors and officers. Many battles have been fought and won by soldiers nourished on beer, and the King does not believe that coffee-drinking soldiers can be relied upon to endure hardships in case of another war.” (1777); in Claudia Roden, Coffee (London: Penguin 1977), p. 22. 9.  Benjamin Wurgaft, Review of Markman Ellis, The Coffeehouse: A Cultural History, in Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture, 7, no. 2 (Spring 2007): 111–112. 10. Ellis, The Coffeehouse. 11.  Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991). 12.  Quoted in Roden, Coffee, p. 25. 13. Oldenburg, The Great Good Place, p. 16. 14. Habermas, Structural Transformation. 15.  Donald Richie, The Inland Sea (Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press, 2002). 16.  Elise Tipton, “The Café: Contested Space of Modernity in Interwar Japan,” in Elise Tipton and John Clark, eds., Being Modern in Japan: Culture and Society from the 1910s to the 1930s, p. 119 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2000). 17.  Carol Gluck, “Japan and Modernity: From History to Theory,” lecture, Harvard University, March 12, 2009. 18.  Elise Tipton, “The Café.”  

 

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19.  Shibata Tokue, personal communication, February 1992. 20.  Ezra Vogel, Japan’s New Middle Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963). 21.  Christine Yano, personal communication, July 17, 2010. 22. Miriam Silverberg, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 23.  Vera Mackie, “Modern Selves and Modern Spaces,” in Elise Tipton and John Clark, eds., Being Modern in Japan: Culture and Society from the 1910s to the 1930s (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2000), pp. 185–199. 24.  Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (New York: Belknap Press, 2002). 25. Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000).  

Ch a p t er 3. Moder ni t y a nd t h e Passion Fac tory 1.  Elise Tipton, “The Café: Contested Space of Modernity in Interwar Japan,” in Elise Tipton and John Clark, eds., Being Modern in Japan: Culture and Society from the 1910s to the 1930s (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2000), pp. 119–136. 2.  Akiyama Nobuichi, Koohii to Kissaten (Tokyo: Shinano Shuppan, 1968), p. 13. 3.  Uekusa Junichi, “When There Were Only Two Hundred Cafés in Tokyo,” Bungeishunju, 14, no. 11 (1977): 40–46. 4.  Matchbox designs told stories of café culture in this period. Produced by well-known artists, they exhibited the popular designs of the time—particularly of the art deco and modernist schools. The labels of the Taisho era were evocative, while those of the Showa era were highly erotic, often with naked women depicted; even cake shops of that time went for sexual images. 5.  Akiyama, op cit. 6.  There is a dispute about the foreign derivation of the café’s name: some say it is French for spring (printemps) and some say it is a plantain, a tropical banana. 7.  Edward Seidensticker, Low City, High City: Tokyo from Edo to the Earthquake (New York: Knopf, 1983), p. 201. 8.  Nagai Kafuu, During the Rains & Flowers in the Shade, ed. and trans. Lane Dunlop (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994). 9.  Miriam Silverberg, “Constructing the Japanese Ethnography of Modernity,” Journal of Asian Studies, 51, no. 1 (February 1992): 30–54. 10.  Silverberg, “Constructing the Japanese Ethnography.” 11.  Murata Takako, Female Beauty in Modern Japan: Make-up and Coiffure (Tokyo: Pola Research Institute of Beauty and Culture, 2003). 12.  Chuo Koron, February 1929, cited in Miriam Silverberg, “The Cafe Waitress Serving Modern Japan,” in Stephen Vlastos, ed., Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 211. 13.  Hirotsu Kazuo, Jokyuu, published in Fujin Koron (1931), p. 79.  

 

 

 

Notes to Chapter 4  |  183

14.  Nagai Kafuu quoted in Hirotsu, Jokyuu, p. 81. 15.  Andrew Gordon, personal communication, May 14, 2008. 16.  Anthony Chambers, “Introduction” to Tanizaki Junichiro, Naomi (Rutland, Vt.: Tuttle Press, 1985). 17.  Silverberg, “The Cafe Waitress Serving Modern Japan.” 18.  Mariko Inoue, “The Gaze of the Café Waitress,” in U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal, 15 (1998): 86–89. See also S. Uenoda, Japan and Jazz: Sketches and Essays on Japanese City Life (Tokyo: Taiheiyosha Press, 1930), pp. 13–19. 19.  Liza Dalby, Geisha (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). 20.  Elise Tipton, “Pink Collar Work: The Cafe Waitress in Early TwentiethCentury Japan,” in Intersections: Gender, History, and Culture in the Asian Context, 7 (March 2002): 6. 21.  Tipton, “The Café.” 22.  Edward Seidensticker, Kafuu the Scribbler: The Life and Writings of Nagai Kafuu, 1879–1959 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1965), p. 97. 23. Kafuu, During the Rains, pp. 25 and 89. 24.  Phyllis Birnbaum, Glory in a Line: A Life of Foujita, the Artist Caught between East and West (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2006), p. 286. 25.  Tomoe Yabe, a Japanese painter trained in Russia in the late 1920s, was influenced by Soviet art, spent time in Paris, and helped to found the Proletarian Visual Arts Movement in Japan. 26.  Ian Condry, Hip-Hop Japan: Rap and the Paths of Cultural Globalization (Raleigh, N.C.: Duke University of Press, 2006). 27.  E. Taylor Atkins, Blue Nippon: Authenticating Jazz in Japan (Durham/ Raleigh, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001). 28.  Ishige Naomichi, Nihon Kissa no Bunka. 29.  Murashima Yoriyuki, Kanraku no okyo kafe (Tokyo: Bunka Seikatsu Kenkyuukai, 1929). 30.  Jazz cafés have been treated by E. Taylor Atkins and by Michael Molasky (Atkins, Blue Nippon; Molasky, Sengo Nihon no Jazz Bunka (Tokyo: Seidosha, 2005) as venues for music and as locations of the construction of taste and style. As Atkins notes, there was an “irrevocable association of jazz and modernism” (p. 100); as a visceral experience, “modanizumu was not something you believed in but something you wore or listened to” (p. 122).  

 

 

Ch a p t er 4. M ast ers of T h eir U ni v erses 1.  “A personal passion to pursue something”: Lewis, personal communication, September 30, 2008. 2.  Nakamura Sae, personal communication, May 12, 2007. 3.  Steven Reed, Making Common Sense of Japan (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993). 4. Takeo Doi, The Anatomy of Dependence (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1973). 5. The notion that “it has to look good to taste good” makes cooking an artistic enterprise. Me de taberu, “you eat with your eyes,” is a watchword of

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culinary practice. Shizuo Tsuji, Japanese Food: A Simple Art (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1980). 6.  Ian Condry, personal communication, September 29, 2009. 7.  Engaged in conversation about his large American Ford car, a cabdriver claimed at first no problems at all using this car in Japan. But then he said, “It is pretty reliable except for one thing. . . . The engine has several bolts which protrude from the engine housing . . . it does not affect the performance of the car. It is a problem because when I clean the engine at the beginning of my shift, my white gloves get caught on the bolts and tear.” R. Dyck, personal communication, October 4, 2008. 8.  Koyama Tetsuo, personal communication, April 2009. 9.  Katsuno Masao, personal communication, October 2, 2008. 10.  Interview with Yuka Murayama, Ikkojin, 98 (July 2008): 53. 11.  Aviad Raz, Emotions at Work (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002). 12.  George Howells, American coffee roaster and consultant, shares Sekiguchi’s view and has his coffee tasters try a coffee at several ten-minute intervals after it is brewed. He says you get the most nuanced flavor at 140 degrees Fahrenheit. 13. Cited in the English language in the online magazine Metropolis, at Metropolis.co.jp, May 27, 2010. 14.  Chushingura is an old legend from which Noh dramas and other literature derive. The story, also known as the Tale of the Forty-seven Ronin, tells of the valiant self-sacrifices made by a group of followers in avenging the death of their master. Historically set in 1701, the legend has become synonymous with giving everything, struggling hard in total, single-minded dedication. 15.  Augusto Ferraiuolo, in his Religious Festive Practices in Boston’s North End (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009) uses “orthopraxy” to describe the “creation and perpetuation of ritual forms ‘considered’ as correct” (p. 175). This term engages ritual ways derived from ritual meanings in orthodoxy and is useful in describing the ritualization of correct practice in some coffee enterprises. 16.  American coffee specialists are working to make machines more human: at the Franklin W. Olin Institute of Engineering outside Boston, a team of young coffee technicians has created a coffee machine called the Luminaire Bravo-1. It is subtly tuned to incorporate the hands-on approach of Japanese coffee-making with the help of technology, allowing the maker to control heat, timing, pressure, and amount of water depending on the bean, its roast and moisture, etc., making the machine a device for perfect “handcrafted” coffee. This technology, which enables handmade taste, will catch on in Japan, I predict, as it accommodates all the variables of concern to a Japanese professional coffee maker. And yet, even with the machine, it is the hand that counts. 17.  Suzuki Yoshio, The Tokyo Coffee Book (Tokyo: Asahi Shoten, 2001), p. 28. 18.  Shiozawa Yukito, Tokyo to Kyoto Kakurega Kissaten (Tokyo: Chuoko­ ronshinsha, 2005), p. 2.

Notes to Chapter 5  |  185

Ch a p t er 5. Ja pa n’s Liquid Pow er 1. Frank Bruni, “Finding Self-Respect, One Drop at a Time,” New York Times, November 24, 2010, D1, D8. 2.  Similar cafés now serving siphon or slow-filter coffee include Abrazo Café in New York, Barismo, Voltage, and Hi-Rise Cafe in the Boston area, many handpour shops like Phil’z in San Francisco, Intelligentsia stores in several locations, and recently, Jaho Café in Salem, Massachusetts, and in Boston’s South End. 3.  Harumi Befu and Sylvie Guichard-Anguis, eds., Globalizing Japan: Ethnography of the Japanese Presence in Asia, Europe and America (London: Routledge, 2001). 4.  Christine Yano, personal communication, May 12, 2008. 5.  Risshin shusse (rise up and prosper) was a Meiji period slogan commonly used to encourage a bootstrapping energy. 6. Quoted in Maruo Shuzo, “The Effects of World Economic Change on Japanese Coffee,” unpublished manuscript, August 1, 2005, p. 7. 7.  Jean de Thévenot, Relation d’un voyage fait au Levant (Paris: L. Billaine, 1665). It is worth noting that the first director-general of the French East India Company (known as the Compagnie des Indes Orientales) was François Caron (1600–1673) who had worked in Japan for twenty years for the Dutch East India Company and was their twelfth opperhoofd, from 1639 to 1641. He had come to Japan in 1619 and lived in Edo as an interpreter, marrying a Japanese woman with whom he had six children. As director-general for the French East India Company he traveled throughout East Asia and, helping to establish bases for the FEIC, visited the islands now called Réunion and Mauritius, which became French depots. The FEIC later had its headquarters in Pondicherry, India. Caron’s presence in Japan and in the Dutch East India Company demonstrated the open web of contacts and interests Europeans in the early seventeenth century maintained in Japan: one’s country of origin was not as significant as one’s capacity to help the European enterprise there prosper. 8.  Paul van der Velde and Rudolf Bachofner, trans. and eds., The Deshima Diaries: Marginalia 1700–1740 (Leiden: Japan-Netherlands Institute, 1992). 9.  Kaihyoosoosho, vol. 2, cited in Maruo, “Effects of World Economic Change,” p. 5. 10.  Cited in Hirokawa Kai, Ranryouhou (Kyoto: Hayashi Press, 1804). 11.  Hirokawa Kai, Nagasaki Bunkenroku (Osaka: Shinjiro, 1797). 12. Yamamoto in Komo Honzou (1783), quoted by Hirokawa in Nagasaki Bunkenroku (1795) and Takahashi Kageyasu and Gentaku Otsuki in Kosei Shimpen (1811); further publication information unavailable. 13. Philipp von Siebold, Manners and Customs of the Japanese (London: John Murray, 1852). 14.  Maruo Shuzo, “Effects of World Economic Change,” p. 17. His source is Philipp von Siebold, Nihon Kotsuu Boueki Shi, in Ikokusoosho; citation unavailable. 15.  Terada Torahiko, “Koohii Tetsugaku Joosetsu,” Keizai Oorai (1933): 74. 16.  Maruo Shuzo, “Effects of World Economic Change,” p. 19. 17.  Ishige Naomichi, The History and Culture of Japanese Food (London: Kegan Paul, 2001), pp. 146ff.  

 

186  |  Notes to Chapter 6

18.  There are several tales of origin for coffee’s arrival in Brazil: one is that of a Portuguese man, Francisco de Mero Parietta, who may have brought coffee in 1670 as a gift from the French commander of Cayenne in French Guiana to the Portuguese colonial ruler. 19.  Maruo Shuzo, “Brazilian Japanese Immigrants: From Work away from Home to Immigration and Coffee Cultivation History,” unpublished manuscript, 2008. 20.  Maruo Shuzo, “Brazilian Japanese Immigrants,” pp. 3, 8. In 2005 coffee importation to Japan was 450,606 tonnes—a 25,033-fold increase. A tonne is one customary weight measurement of coffee, weighing 1,000 kg or 2,204.62 pounds. More usually cited is the amount of coffee in 60 kg bags. 21.  Keiko Yamanaka, “ ‘I will go home, but when?’ Labor Migration and Circular Diaspora Formation by Japanese Brazilians in Japan,” in Mike Douglass and Glenda S. Roberts, eds., Japan and Global Migration: Foreign Workers and the Advent of a Multicultural Society, pp. 120–149 (London: Routledge, 2000). 22.  Keiko Yamanaka, “ ‘I will go home, but when?’ ” ibid. 23.  “To the New World, and Then,” Asahi newspaper, April 28, 2008. 24.  Patricia Ribeiro, “Japanese Immigration in Brazil: The Kasato Maru and the First Immigrants,” http://gobrazil.about.com/od/culturehistorylanguage/a/ kasatomaru.htm, accessed October 1, 2011. 25.  One migrant worker, Minamihara Chiyoki, settled near Franca and had a very difficult life, but brought his family from Japan and accumulated some wealth through growing cotton after working the Brazilian coffee plantations. Now, in his late eighties, Minamihara works his own coffee plantation with his sons; their coffee is now sold in Japan as a Japanese-Brazilian product. Asahi newspaper, April 28, 2008. Later, in 1974, it would be Japanese who created the Cerrrado Development Project, a large agricultural project on the savanna, as a means of combating coffee shortages in Japan. Cerrado today produces 18 percent of all Arabica beans produced in Brazil. 26.  Maruo Shuzo, “Brazilian Japanese Immigrants,” p. 2. 27.  Tereza Rezende, Ryu Mizuno: Saga japonesa em terras brasileiras (São Paulo: Curitiba, 1991). 28. Rezende, Ryu Mizuno, cited in Maruo, “Brazilian Japanese Immigrants.” 29.  Robert Lawrence cited in Jane McCabe, Tea and Coffee Trade Journal (July 1, 1989): 16. 30.  George Field, From Bonsai to Levis (New York: Mentor Books, 1983), pp. 85–87. 31.  Maruo Shuzo, personal communication, February 17, 2009.  

 

 

Ch a p t er 6. M a k ing Coffee Ja pa n ese 1.  Kato’s patent application, accepted in August 1903, is of interest: Be it known that I, Satori Kato, a subject of the Emperor of Japan, residing at Chicago, in the county of Cook and State of Illinois, have invented certain new and useful Improvements in Coffee Concentrate. . . . The specific process may be described as follows: I first roast and reduce the coffee to a finely divided condition

Notes to Chapter 6  |  187 by grinding or pulverizing and then subject it to heavy pressure to remove the fats, after which the volatile oil is separated from the coffee by distillation. The residue remaining after the removal of the volatile oil is diluted with hot water and allowed to cool, after which it is thoroughly agitated to cause whatever fats remain therein to collect at the top, so that they can be readily skimmed off. The residue is then filtered . . . then boiled . . . until all moisture has been evaporated and reduced to a hard substance. This hard substance is then granulated in a suitable manner, and a portion thereof—say one-fourth of the quantity—is pulverized and mixed with the volatile oil. This mixture is spread on a hard, dry, smooth surface, such as glass or porcelain, and dried in a temperature above freezing-point, and preferably below 40 Fahrenheit to retain the aroma . . . [then] mixed with the remainder of the granulated hard substance, and the coffee concentrate is then obtained in a commercial form which will retain its aroma and all the other desirable properties of the coffee-beans and can be used in this finely-divided condition or pressed into tablets or other form.” (Patent Number 735,777. Application filed 17 April 1901. Letters Patent Issued 11 August 1903.)  

 

2. Hario manufactures a ceramic filter top, the V-60, that allows for the flow of hot water better to permeate the grounds in the paper filter. This is now becoming standard in many Japanese and American pour-over coffee shops. 3. The average price of green beans rose from 203 yen per kg in 2002 to 315 in 2008. 4.  Cited in Maruo Shuzo, “The Effects of World Economic Change on Japanese Coffee,” unpublished manuscript, August 1, 2008. 5.  A Japanese cup is small by American standards, about six ounces, compounding the density. 6.  Ian Condry, personal communication, October 2, 2008. 7.  Christine Yano, personal communication, September 30, 2008. 8. These bottles have their antecedents in the little brown glass bottles of energy potion taken “medicinally” by businessmen with hangovers or low stamina, and sold at train station kiosks or now in vending machines. They contain nicotine, sugar, and caffeine, performance-enhancing substances for the salaryman. 9. Takahashi Yasuo, “Why You Can’t Have Green Tea in a Japanese Coffee Shop,” in Ueda Atsushi, ed., The Electric Geisha: Exploring Japan’s Popular Culture, pp. 26–33 (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1994). 10.  Kato Hidetoshi, “Coffee, Tea or What? The Role of Stimulants in Human Communication,” NIME. Media, Culture and Education (1992): 5. 11.  Takahashi, “Why You Can’t Have Green Tea,” p. 31. 12.  Green tea ice cream was created in Japan in the 1920s, but it was not popular. Its cachet was created in America in the 1970s, when the dessert niche in the menu of Asian restaurants needed something at least vaguely Asian. Dessert as such was not commonly served in Asia; but in America meals were expected to end with a sweet, making popular in Asian restaurants such “oriental” ice creams as green tea, ginger, and red bean. 13.  Katarzyna Cwiertka, Modern Japanese Cuisine: Food, Power and National Identity (London: Reaktion Books, 2003), p. 79. 14.  One example of foods whose meanings shift and whose rules may be transferred is particularly interesting. There is a sort of taboo in Japan against  

188  |  Notes to Chapter 7

“doubling” rice-based beverages with rice dishes: drinking sake with sushi, for example, is not orthodox. The sake, made from rice, must be drunk either before or after the rice, as rice and products made from it should not be consumed together. Why this became a light taboo is unknown, and ordinary people find it hard to explain the principle to others. The principle was transferred to Western foodstuffs for a brief time shortly after World War II: when food is served, beer should not be on the table, but could appear “after the bread.” It was felt that bread, as the Western equivalent to the staple rice in the Japanese diet, should not be eaten with beer, also made with grain, the Western staple. But with sushi, though you could not drink sake you might drink beer, and you may still find sushiya where it is the custom is to drink beer with the sushi, following sake with the sashimi. Two explanations are available: beer, being a foreign beverage (as it was explained, though for most people beer is a “normal” and very Japanese drink), was outside the field of custom; alternatively, beer, made from other grains, does not compete with rice. A third, more general principle has been offered: rice and bread as staple foods must be respected, and so rice should not become upstaged by sake, nor should bread by beer. In another transposition of customs, the Western habit of eating peanuts with beer was transferred to coffee after the war, when small bowls of shelled peanuts would appear as saabisu (free goods) along with a cup of coffee. Richard Hosking, personal communication, March 30, 2007. 15.  Licensing fees for cafés serving meals are twice what they are for cafés defined by coffee and beverage service. Maruo Shuzo, personal communication, June 3, 2008.

Ch a p t er 7. U r ba n Public Cult u r e 1.  Research on coffee spaces in the West has produced many studies of interest and contrast to this work. Among these are Bryant Simon, Everything but the Coffee: Learning about America from Starbucks (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); Brian Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005); Markman Ellis, The Coffeehouse: a Cultural History (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2004); Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffeeshops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community (New York: Marlowe, 1989); William Roseberry, “The Rise of Yuppie Coffees and the Reimagination of Class in the United States,” American Anthropologist, 98, no. 4 (December 1996): 762–775; Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft, “Starbucks and Rootless Cosmopolitanism,” in Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture, 3, no. 4 (2003): 71–75. 2.  Bryant Simon, Everything but the Coffee, p. 95. 3.  Shibata Tokue, personal communication, February 1993. 4.  Maki Fumihiko, “The City and Inner Space” (orig. “Nihon no toshi kuukan to ‘oku,’ ” in Sekai [December 1978]), translated in Japan Echo, 6, no. 1 (1979): 91–103. 5.  Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in The Sociology of  

 

 

Notes to Chapter 7  |  189

Georg Simmel, ed. and trans. Kurt H. Wolff (New York: Free Press, 1976), pp. 409–426. 6.  Louis Wirth, “Urbanism as a Way of Life,” American Journal of Sociology, 44, no. 1 (July 1938): 1–24. 7.  Herbert Gans, The Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of ­ItalianAmericans (New York: Free Press, 1962). 8.  Henry Smith, “City and Country in England and Japan: Rus in urbe versus Kyoo ni inaka ari,” in Senri Ethnological Studies, 19 (1986): 29–39. 9.  Smith, “City and Country.” 10.  English poet James Thomson saw London as a place of human misery; the title of his long narrative poem was used by later writers who saw urban life as demonic or depressing. 11.  Ronald T. Dore, City Life in Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958), and Ezra Vogel, Japan’s New Middle Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), laid a detailed descriptive base for the postwar Japanese city. 12.  S. Uenoda, Japan and Jazz: Sketches and Essays on Japanese City Life (Tokyo: Taiheiyosha Press, 1930), p. 7. 13.  Manuel Tardits, “ ‘Initiateurs urbains’: Gares et grands magasins,” in Augustin Berque, Urbanité française, urbanité nippone, pp. 317–320 (Paris; EHESS, 1994). 14.  Kobakura Yasuyoshi, Ryoori Okinawa Monogatari (Tokyo: Sakuinsha, 1983). 15. Walter Benjamin cited in Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991). 16.  In the early twenty-first century, being too unconnected has taken on negative meanings, as we will see. The “dark personality” of an otaku, or isolated and possibly dangerous “nerd,” is seen as a social issue. 17.  Vera Mackie, “Modern Selves and Modern Spaces,” in Elise Tipton and John Clark, eds., Being Modern in Japan: Culture and Society from the 1910s to the 1930s (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2000), p. 195. 18.  Jordan Sand, “The Cultured Life as Contested Space, in Elise Tipton and John Clark, eds., Being Modern in Japan: Culture and Society from the 1910s to the 1930s (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2000), pp. 99–118. 19. Kathleen S. Uno, Passages to Modernity: Motherhood, Childhood and Social Reform in Early Twentieth Century Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1999). 20.  Laura Shapiro, Perfection Salad (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). 21. Dore, City Life in Japan. 22.  Such arches, like the torii announcing the path to the Shinto shrine, mark transits from general to specific spaces, identified by function for consumption, entertainment, or prayer. The precincts of commerce are no less significant than those of prayer. 23.  Brian Sinclair, Urban Japan: Considering Homelessness, Characterizing Shelter and Contemplating Culture (New York: AIA, 2010).  

 

 

 

 

190  |  Notes to Chapter 8

24.  Lawrence Wylie, Village in the Vaucluse (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961), p. 245. 25. Jennifer Robertson, Native and Newcomer: Making and Remaking a Japanese City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 26.  On the grounds of the imperial palace is a small rice paddy where annually the emperor, “blessing” the year’s crop, plants rice shoots. Mori himself plants the first rice shoots on the roof of his Roppongi “palace.” 27. Shun’ichi Watanabe, “Toshi Keikaku vs. Machizukuri: Emerging Paradigms of Civil Society in Japan, 1950–1980,” in André Sorensen and Carolin Funck, eds., Living Cities in Japan: Citizens’ Movements, Machizukuri and Local Environments (London: Routledge, 2007), p.. 39–55. 28.  Leng Leng Thang, Generations in Touch: Linking the Old and Young in a Tokyo Neighborhood (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001). 29.  “English garden cities”: Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). 30.  Koono Makoto cited in Jeffrey Hanes, The City as Subject: Seki Hajime and the Reinvention of Modern Osaka (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p. 223. Also, Koono, Toshi ka den’en ka? (Tokyo: Matsuyamaboo, 1923), cited in Hanes, pp. 173–174. 31.  Morton White and Lucia White, The Intellectual versus the City (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 1962). 32. Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990). 33.  Theodore Bestor, Neighborhood Tokyo (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1989), p. 8. 34. The mizushobai had their origins on the water, as brothel boats and party boats carried pleasurable dissolution on the rivers of Tokyo. 35.  Liza Dalby, Geisha (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), p. 325. 36. Ibid., p. 273. 37.  Ibid., p. 271. 38.  There are now more than 83,000 cafés in Japan designated as kissaten. In 2007, the number of registered kissaten as 83,676 according to the Ministry of Public Management. In Tokyo, there are 8,036; in Osaka, 13,000; and in Kyoto, 3,000. The density of cafés is highest in Osaka, where the number of cafés per square kilometer is double that in Tokyo (kissaten data for 2007 from the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, Statistics Bureau, Tokyo). According to Maruo Shuzo, what makes a shop a kissaten is the service of coffee above all; the provision of foods requires an additional license. 39.  Oliver Strand, “Ristretto: Tokyo Coffee.” New York Times, December 16, 2011.  

 

 

Ch a p t er 8. K now ing You r Pl ace 1. Yoshimura Motoo, Toshi wa yosei de yomigaeru (Tokyo: Gakugei Shuppansha).

Notes to Chapter 8  |  191

2.  David Leheny, The Rules of Play: National Identity and the Shaping of Japanese Leisure, Cornell Studies in Political Economy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003). 3.  Asahi Shimbun, June 11, 2005. 4.  Morimoto Reo, Ikkojin, 98 (July 2008): 53. 5.  Reo, 55.

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Acknowledgments

This is a project of connection: I owe much to many links in the Great Chain of Coffee, such as Bonnie Slotnick who introduced me to Yoshinobu Majima who introduced me to Professor Maruo Shuzo, my guru and source for all things coffee. Maruo-sensei tirelessly sought answers to all my questions and inspired me with his commitment to excellence all the way from tree to bean to cup. His colleagues in coffee, Yamada-san, Tsuji-san, and many others, were also very generous and helpful. Fusako Shore and Tazuko Wada of the Kyoto Consortium were indispensable connectors too—leading me to wonderful venues all over Kyoto. Richard Dyck introduced me to coffee people and places from Tokyo to Ratanakiri, Cambodia, and always offered thoughtful commentary. Other Japan-based friends and colleagues, like Elaine and Jim Baxter, Charlie and Sawako Fox, Mike Molasky (whose work on jazz kissa is illuminating), and Henry and Kimi Smith, were willing to sip all over town with me. Shiomi Noriko, Yamamoto Yoko, and Nakamura Sae, my most able and creative research assistants, helped me search into the corners of café history. And the cafés themselves provided inspiration, information, and a corner table where I could observe and write. Listing them all here would be impossible: I am grateful to call “home” the fourteen or so cafés that I haunted. Many appear in the guide in the appendix. Each deserves my singular commitment, and if I could have cloned myself, each would have had it. But I will mention here a few: Cafe Sagan, whose kind owners supported me and shared their time and experience and even loaned me a home roaster for my ill-judged experiments; Mo-An on the top of Kyoto’s Yoshida-yama was a place of serenity, beauty, and great scones; Otafuku, also in Kyoto, where Noda-san invited me to the counter; Tanaka-san’s roasting shop offered fine beans, lessons in hand-pouring, a comfortable chair, and coffee talk; the Jumpei coffee circle of craftspeople and artists showed me how a community and great talk can be nurtured with cups of coffee and plates of cake.  

205

206  |  Acknowledgments

Exploring urban Japan was always my pleasure. The first book I read on modern Japan was Ronald Dore’s City Life in Japan, which inspired me to take up the trade, and it is to this book that the title of the present book pays homage. Thanks to Dr. Lola Martinez, I was able to use the library facilities of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. I found the RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts) café on nearby Gower Street congenial for breaks, if not for work: there, fledgling thespians would declaim their parts to each other and take my mind off the seventeenth-century Dutch diaries I was reading. In Kyoto, through the kind intercession of Catherine Ludvik, Director Silvio Vita at the Scuola di Studi sull’Asia Orientale generously gave me a desk, a lap blanket, and the useful library for working in the cold winter of 2008, when running down the street for coffee at Shinshindo was sometimes daunting. These sojourns were sponsored by the Japan Foundation, to which I am deeply grateful. Family, friends, and spaces at home too supported this work. My son Ben Wurgaft talked me through tricky parts and read endless drafts. My daughter Jennifer White Callaghan encouraged me as I explored London’s coffees while I worked at SOAS; I look forward to taking my granddaughter Meghan on such missions. My brother Henry Isaacs provided caffeinated contrarian encouragement when I got too lost in rhapsodic java talk: he said, “It’s just coffee.” Deborah Valenze sat with me over many coffees and drafts; our partnership was heaven-sent as her book on milk (Milk: A Local and Global History [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2011]) and mine on coffee took shape at the same time. Adam Tessier was a smart, supportive, corrective, and enthusiastic editor; he saw the manuscript at the end of its rope and hoisted it up. Chris Yano also read chapters and contributed her ever-witty and helpful comments. Simon of Simon’s Café and Jaime and Chris van Schyndel of Barismo Coffee shared their expertise and many coffee stories. Without the following two women, there would have been no book. Jenny White tirelessly and lovingly supported me as the angst of writing sometimes got the better of me; her own consummate skills in research, writing, and editing are always inspirational. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Sheila Levine of the University of California Press and her colleagues. Sheila’s patience and encouragement got me through the many drafts that finally ended in this manuscript. My home away from home for writing in Harvard Square was the Hi-Rise Café. And my barista supreme is Judson Macrae. In the low-ceilinged upper rooms there in the dead of winter I wrote much of what is between these covers. And with Judson’s coffee, I could taste Japan. He has true kodawari. I thank him for the introduction to Bear Pond in Tokyo, and I move with Judson to whatever place he is pulling the shots. In the garden of the Hi-Rise Café sat the IgNobel “salon” where every week there was the very best conversation and bonhomie. Thanks to Marc Abrahams, our motivating spirit, and to Jean Berko Gleason for being the resident gadfly and polymath. This is what cafés are meant to provide. Gus Rancatore took the pulse of the book and gave it a stronger beat. He asked and answered all the right questions, scribbled thoughtful notes on shirt cardboards, and listened patiently as I stumbled toward clarity. This book, with my love, is for Gus.

Index

advertising, 68–69, 78, 110, 116 affectionate enterprises, 70, 76 African slaves, 97–98, 99 aftertaste (nodogoshi), 72, 115 alcohol: and cabaret cafés, 44, 47, 122, 162; and jazz cafés, 60; solitude and, 4; as “wet” inebriation (shimetta meitei), 60 Ali, Mr., 122 All Nippon Airlines, 68–69 Ambient Café Mole, 117, 124, 176 anabateki, kakurega (hole-in-the-wall) kissa, 54–55, 163, 164–168 anarchists, 63 anime, 92, 116, 118, 126 anonymity: bars and, 134; and chain cafés, 166; lack of, 131; and mizushobai (water trades), 153; and “not seeing,” 131, 134, 153; and postWorld War II needs, 55; and “salary-fication” of public spaces, 54; “shoji,” 134, 155–156; urbanity and, 37; and writers, 56. See also solitude, need for apartment dwellers, 129, 131–132, 134, 145 Arab coffeehouses, 21–22 Arabica beans, 186n25 art cafés: and foreign innovation, 27; François, 175–176; gallery-cafés, 40, 56, 57, 157–158, 163, 170, 177; retrospective homage in, x; woman-owned, 87–88 art, iki and, 152 artists. See writers, artists, and intellectuals  

 

arubaito (students in part-time work), 87–88, 166, 169 Asahi Plantation (Brazil), 100 ashiyu cafés, 41 asobi (play), 42 Atkins, E. Taylor, 183n30 atmosphere, 160–161 atopian spaces, 168  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

bakery cafés, 40 Bambi (café), 176–177 Barismo (café), 89, 118, 125–126, 185n2, 206 barista as profession, 74, 75. See also masters bars, 12, 14, 17, 35, 132, 134, 141, 151, 177 Batavia, 94 Baudelaire, Charles, 37 Bauhaus style, 32, 37, 141, 177 beans: aging of, 72; amount imported to Japan, 99, 113, 179n1, 186n20; brands of, 106, 107; contract relationships (kanban) with distributors, 78, 79, 101–102; dilution of exclusive brands, 106; drying of, 102–103, 107; fermentation of, 102; franchising relationships with distributors, 78, 101, 102; independent purchasing of, 78–79, 102; lowerpriced, sales of, 112; picking, 102; price of, 104, 187n3; single-bean coffees, 72, 87, 105– 106, 115; size grading, 102–103; storage of, 102–103, 107; storage of roasted beans, 72; terroir, 103, 106, 111; varieties, development  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

207

208  |  Index beans (continued) of, 102, 106–107, 116; vintage, choosing of, 71; Web site sales by Koyama, 79. See also blends; grinding beans; roasting beans Bear Pond (café), 73–74, 76, 81, 174 beer, 44, 181n8, 187–188n14 Beethoven, Ludwig von, 113 Benjamin, Walter, 37, 140 benkyobeya (study-hall cafés), 167–168 bento boxes, 156 Bestor, Theodore, 151 bicycles, 40, 84, 85, 128, 146, 175 bird-friendly coffee, 111 blends: of Cattleya café, 114–115; house blend (burendo), 112, 115; as master skill, 103, 115; Sekiguchi and, 72 Blue Bottle (San Francisco), 89–90, 118, 126 Blue Bottle (Vienna), 22 body (koku) of brew, 115 books, provision of, 167 bookstore cafés, 40, 167–168 borrowed landscape (shakkei), 51, 154, 164, 167, 170 Boss Coffee, 117 Boston, 133, 138 boulevardiers. See flaneurs Bourbon beans, 107 Brasileiro (literary journal), 46–47 Brazil: African slaves as workers on ­plantations, 97–98, 99; as coffee consuming and exporting country, 17, 97; early Japanese trade with, 20; indigenous Indians as ­workers on plantations, 97–98; industrial coffee exports, 110; as influence on early cafés, 179n3; introduction of coffee to, 97, 196n18; Japan as overseas market, 5, 29, 45, 99, 105, 173; Japanese migrants owning plantations in, 5, 99–100, 186n25; Japanese migrants returning from, 29, 45; Japanese migrant workers in, 91, 98–100, 105, 186n25; percentage of coffee crop exported to Japan, 99, 104; percentage of coffee crop exported to U.S. and Germany, 99; price of beans from, 104 Brazilian Santos beans, 79, 105 Brazil Trade Company, 46 bread, as Western staple, 187–188n14 bread bakery, 177 breakfast (morning set), 29–30, 123–125, 142–143, 176–177 “brown cafés,” 55 Buddhism, 96, 97, 119, 141 bunkajin. See writers, artists, and intellectuals bunmei kaika (civilization and enlightenment) program, 10, 93, 97, 162  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

burendo (house blend), 112, 115 buruman (Jamaican Blue Mountain), 106, 107 buskers, 12, 14, 152 cabaret-style cafés: alcohol and, 44, 47, 122, 162; eroticism and sexuality and, 47, 49–53, 54, 65; jazz kissa compared to, 58–59, 60; live music in, 44, 58–59; teahouses as antecedent to, 4–5, 13, 14–17, 30, 44, 161, 179n3; ­writers and, 47, 49–50, 51–52, 53–54. See also waitresses cacao beans, 121 Café (painting by Leonard Foujita), 58 Café Brasileiro, 45 Café de l’Ambre (Kafe do Ramburu), 70–73, 76, 77, 80, 103, 116, 119, 173, 184n12 Café de Naniwaya, 174 Café Foy, 25 Café François, 31 Café Ginza West, 174 Café Lion, 47, 58, 60 café masters. See masters (maasutaa) Café Paulista, 6, 45–46, 100, 173 Café Printemps (Plantain), 47, 182n6 Café Purantan (Printemps, Plaintain), 55–56 Café Royal, 9 cafés: contradiction central to, 154–156; ­density of numbers of, 190n38; distinguished from restaurants, 122, 123, 125, 188n15; distinguished from the kissaten, 29–30, 32, 190n38; divergence from kissaten, 29, 53–54; economic downturns and correlation with numbers of cafés, 153; as educational spaces, 7, 16, 32, 138; employees, numbers of, 153; furnishings and style of, 32, 36, 37; future of, 171–172; and gap between official (tatemae) and actual (honne) life, 156, 190n39; ghost presence in, 153; green tea served gratis in, 120; as hobby, 159–160; influences on early Japanese, 17, 26–27, 29, 47, 55–56, 179n3; “Japanese” behavior expected in, 3, 14, 156, 165–166; Japanese cultural logics of, 154; legitimacy of space bought in, 146; licensing for food, 123, 188n15, 190n38; new generation of, 40–41; as no-place place, 154, 158, 163, 164–168; as “normal” part of Japanese life, 100–101, 161; number of, 99, 146, 153, 190n38; number of independent, as decreasing, 28, 40, 76; number of, in Europe, 23–24; number of visitors to, 46; and the out-ofwork, 147–148; quirky offerings of, 168; as roji (lane), 132; teahouses as a­ ntecedent to, 4–5, 13, 14–17, 30, 44, 161, 179n3; as unmarked space, 35–36, 131, 155–156. See also chain cafés; functions of cafés; music  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Index  |  209 cafés; naturalization of coffee and cafés as Japanese; nostalgia cafés; novelty, cafés providing; third space, café as Café Sagan, 205 Café Saza, 82 cafetière (French press), 80, 111 Café Tiger, 47, 54, 58, 60 Café Tsukiji, 17, 56, 81, 176 caffeine: amount per cup, 121; decaffeinated ­coffee, 115–116; low-caffeine bean, development of, 116 cake shops, 182n4 Cambodia, 111 campanilismo, 133 Canopius, Nathaniel, 22 Caron, François, 185n7 castera (sponge cake), 55 Castro, Fidel, 84 Cattleya (café), 114–115 cell phones, 7, 128, 130, 146, 169, 171 Cerrado Development Project, 186n25 Ceylon, 94 chai, 121, 176 chain cafés: anonymity and, 166; Café Paulista, 6, 45–46, 100, 173; disdain for, 160–161, 169; draining customer base of independents, 78; the elderly and, 169; first global chain, as Japanese-Brazilian, 45–46, 98, 100; new customer base created by, 28; as no-place place, 168; novelty not on offer in, 65; and particularity, lack of, 65; and regionality, lack of, 115; regionality of references to, 115; retaining “foreign” nature, 33; students and, 167– 168; underneath railway stations, 166 chakan (formal teahouse), 179n3 charcoal roasted coffee (sumiyaki), 114 Charles II (king of England), 23, 181n7 chawanmushi (egg custard), 124 chaya. See teahouses Chian Ijiho (Public Peace Maintenance Law), 63 Chigusa (jazz club), 60 China, tea and, 119, 121 Chin Houfuku, 62 Chin Souichi, 62 Chionji Temple handicraft fair, 82 chocolate drinks, 121 Chushingura (Tale of the Forty-seven Ronin), 77, 184n14 cities: accidental engagement in, 131–132, 134, 145, 166; admirers and detractors, 134, 135– 136, 150–151, 153–154, 189n10; collective inner space as disappearing, 131–132; ­consumption patterns of Japanese, 40; deliberate vs. accidental creation of, 38–39; diversity of, 135;  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

front and back spaces, 131–132; global, 39– 40; as grid, 129–130; lanes of (roji), ix, 11–12, 130, 131–132, 165–166; modernity as phenom­ enon of, 32; noise of, 134; “not-seeing” (not noticing) and, 128, 131, 134, 142, 153, 155–156, 165–166; planning, 150; pleasures of, and lack of time to enjoy, 132–133; predictability vs. novelty, 128–129, 139–140, 152; sacred, 38; sakariba (animated spaces), 11–12, 14, 53–54, 136–137, 151–152; saturation of the sensibility caused by, 132–133; shape of, 38– 39; strolling, art of, 132, 136–137; unifocality vs. tripartite, 135; unique qualities of Japanese, 130; urban villagers (shitamachi), 133– 134, 136, 138; vs. older neighborhoods, use of cafés in, 35–36; as walkable, 145, 151; as web, 129–130; zoning patterns of, 145. See also anonymity; countryside; home; neighborhoods; private-in-public space; public social spaces; respite space, cafés as; solitude, need for; transportation; urbanity; work and the workplace civility, 25, 26 civilization and enlightenment (bunmei kaika), 10, 93, 97, 162 classical music cafés (meikyoku kissa), 48, 58, 60–62, 61, 140, 177 classical music, perfectionism and, 68 classlessness, 28; of early cafés, 10, 16, 45; and European-style cafés, 23; and lighting of city streets, 136–137; and social mobility, 30; and transportation, 138 class status: destruction of status system, 15; of merchant class, 10, 14–15, 16; of moga (modern girls), 48–49; of samurai, 10, 15, 16; of waitresses, 52. See also classlessness; middle class; working class closed country period (sakoku jidai), 94 clothing: and Ginza stroll, 137; individualism of master and, 74–75; kimonos, 50, 52, 53; of Noda-san, 81; orientalism of cafés and, 63; and Taisho-era women, 145; of waitresses, 50, 52, 53; Western performance of, 10; yofuku (Western), 31 coffee (koohii): acid quality, 113; aftertaste (nodo­ goshi), 72, 115; bird-friendly, 111; bitter, 112– 113; body (koku) of, 115; cafés as merged with, 3; canned, in vending machines, 3, 117–118, 120, 187n8; decaffeinated, 115–116; dessert drinks, 120; dry inebriation of (kawaita meitei), 60; earliest appearance and trading of, 94; flavored, 113, 115, 120; as foreign, 23; gold-leaf-flecked, 153; iced, 90, 110, 126; importers of, as rarely producers, 17, 97; instant, 46, 109–110, 117; “Japanese,”  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

210  |  Index coffee (koohii) (continued) 5, 112–118; koohiito, 96; medicinal use of, 5, 94–97, 116, 119, 187n8; as mobile phenomenon, 17; as “normal” beverage, 4, 5, 93, 100–101, 112, 113–114; price of cup of, 10, 75, 79, 82, 87, 104–105, 113, 139; rank as trade commodity, 20; rank of Japan in coffeeconsuming countries, 3, 179n1; “regular”, coffee-machine coffee, 110; as sacred offering to the gods, 95; satogashi, 96–97; scarcity of, during World War, II, 64, 100, 139; the senses and, 72; strength (density) of (koi/usui), 112–113, 115; substitute (daiyoo koohii), 64, 100, 139; suspicions and suppression of, 23, 181nn7–8; sustainability and, 111–112; temperature of, for drinking, 73, 184n12; terms for, 179n3. See also beans; coffee industry; coffee-making; ­consumers/ customers/clientele; grinding beans; m ­ asters; naturalization of coffee and cafés; organic products; quality; roasting beans; tools of coffee coffee cupper (quality assurance), 103 coffee equipment (koohii no odoogu), 80–82, 83, 90, 184n16; as both art and craft, 68; changes in technology, and functions of cafés, 24, 26, 27; espresso, 73–74, 81, 116; export overseas, 80, 89–90, 125, 126; French press, 80, 111; hand pour, 71–72, 81–82, 83, 187n2; Hario equipment, 90, 187n2; home roasting machines, 111; machines generally eschewed, 80–81, 116; machine to create handmade coffee, 184n16; revolutions in, 108–109; siphon, 67, 75–76, 80, 90, 110–111, 114, 175, 185n2; taste vs. efficiency and, 110– 111. See also filters and strainers; grinding beans; roasting beans Coffee GoGo, 140 coffeehouse, as term, 179n3 coffee industry: assimilation promoted by, 5; contracts with café owners, 78, 101–102, 103; efficacy of, 3; high costs, 104, 105; ­managed predictability and, 101, 105, 107, 108–109; publications, 79, 103; relationship with point of origin, 103; trust as critical to, 79, 102, 105, 115, 116; vertical integration and, 10, 101, 106. See also beans; farmers and farming; management of cafés coffee jelly (koohii zeri), 123 coffee-machine made coffee, 110 coffeemaniakku (“coffee maniac”), 72, 173 coffee-milk, 43–44, 117 coffee shops (koohii no mise), 163 coffee syrup, 46 coffee trees, 102–103  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Colombian coffee, 82, 104, 106, 107, 110, 115, 173 commerce: European coffeehouses and, 24, 25, 26; Japanese coffeehouses and, 47; kodawari as, 68, 69, 80, 82, 85; zones of, around railroad stations, 137. See also work and the workplace communication and cafés: in Europe, 24, 26, 148–149; in Japan, 169–170 community: American cafés and need for, 20, 26, 127, 128; customers bringing, 169; French cafés and need for, 148–149; ­individualism juxtaposed with, 133; Japanese cafés and need for, 3–5, 7, 127–128, 138, 149–151, 159, 168–170; teahouses (chaya) and, 4–5, 14, 17. See also solitude Conder, Josiah, 10 Condry, Ian, 58 Confucianism, 67, 70 connoisseurship: of consumers, 113; of masters, 71–74, 78–79, 80–82, 83–85, 184nn15–16 Constantinople, 21–22 consumers/customers/clientele: and ambience, 114; connoisseurship of, 113; consumption as amusement, 137–138; as culture, rise of, 143–145; gender and, 113; and house blends, 115; housewives, 34, 35, 40, 134, 143–144, 145; master relationships with, 67, 73, 74, 77–78, 82–83, 86, 88, 108, 127–128, 164–165, 166–167; men as, 7, 10, 15, 16, 49, 161, 162, 166; performance of café demanded by, 154; preferences, knowledge enough to have, 114; purism and, 115; return of, ensuring, 170; as scenery, 170; women as, 7, 15, 42–43, 55, 58; youth market, 113, 125. See also elderly; retirees; students conversation, 60, 81, 119, 131, 151, 157, 159 coterie cafés, 54, 55 Counter Culture Coffee, 74 countryside: chaya (teahouses) as comfort zone, 16; industrialization and, 32; koohiito served in, 16; lack of cafés in, 16; migration of people to cities, 16, 136, 139, 144–145; people from, using cafés, 11, 139, 145; as term, 134; as traditional, 32; value of, as culturally varied, 135. See also cities cult of domesticity, 144 cultural organization, 91–92, 101 culture: European coffeehouses and, 24–25; “Japanese”, in cafés, 154, 156, 165–166, 171– 172; performance of “unofficial” as function of café, 27, 155, 190n39. See also social change cups, 72, 187n5 curry (kare raisu), 108, 122, 123, 176 cut-hair girls, 48  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Index  |  211 Dalby, Liza, 152 dance halls, 59 dankai generation, 169 dansu kissa (dance cafés), 60 dark-souled or dark personality (nekura), 141, 146, 165, 171, 189n16 Dazaifu Tenmangu Shrine, 95 decaffeinated coffee, 115–116 dei Celtelli, Francisco Procopio, 24 dekasegi rodo (worker away from home), 144 Delicious Coffee Series (Murayama), 70 democracy, 5, 12–13, 47–48 Den-en Chofu, Tokyo, 150 department stores, 43, 104, 131, 137–138, 143, 146, 156, 166 dependency, positively valued (amae), 69, 70 Deshima Island, 94–95 desks, rental of, 167 detail, attention to. See kodawari direct management shops, 78–79 doughnuts, Portuguese/Brazilian (malasada), 46 Doutor (chain café), 5, 28, 105, 166 Duet (café), 59 During the Rains (Nagai), 47 Dutch East India Company, 94, 96, 185n7  

 

 

 

 

 

earthquakes, 30, 44, 53, 98, 131, 136, 145 Ebihara Kinosuke, 57–58 Echigoya (dry-goods store), 137–138 economy: cafés surviving 1980s bubble, 40; coffee as focus in shrinking, 170; and reduction in numbers of independent cafés, 28, 40 Edo. See Tokyo Edo (Tokugawa) period (1603–1868): bakufu ambivalence about coffee, 96; city develop­ ment in, 38; class restrictions, 10; geisha of, 52; history of coffee and, 93–96, 185n7; import tax on coffee, 96; kanban signs, 78; mizushobai (“water trades”), 13–14, 15, 152–153, 190n34; teahouses and, 119; and tobacco, 10 edokko, 138 education: café management courses, 28, 75–76; cafés providing, 7, 16, 32, 138; of masters, 74, 75–76, 77, 82; as service, 82; and time, use of, 33; of youth, 139 efish (café), 2, 177 elderly: and anonymity, eschewing, 169; community in cafés, 6, 169; diversity of population, 76; and need for public social spaces, 76, 150; and nostalgia cafés, 169; ­percentage of pppulation, 6; social-service cafés for, 163. See also retirees energy drinks, 1878 England: and church bells, 133; and communi 

 

 

 

cation as function of cafés, 24, 26; and the country, value of, 135; curry and, 122; initial Japanese cafés emulating coffee style of, 17, 29, 179n3; London as unifocal city, 135; number of cafés in, 23–24; origination of coffee in, 22–24, 25; public houses and industrialization, 138; suspicion and suppression of cafés and coffee, 23, 181n7; and tea, 9, 25 entertainment: bars, 12, 14, 17, 35, 132, 134, 141, 151, 177; department stores as, 137; postwar, 140; sakariba (animated spaces), 11–12, 14, 53–54, 136–137, 151–152; and strolling, art of, 132, 136–137; theater, 13–14, 52–53, 152, 176, 184n14. See also cafés; music; teahouses eroguronansensu (erotic, grotesque, and nonsensical), 37 eroticism and sexuality: brothels, 12, 152, 190n34; matchbox designs and, 182n4; mizushobai (water trades), 13–14, 15, 152–153, 190n34; prostitutes, 5, 12, 95, 152, 190n34; tea shops and, 121; waitress cafés and, 47, 49–53, 54, 65 espresso, 73–74, 81, 116 esunikku (ethnic) cafés, 40, 63, 121 Ethiopian coffee, 71, 93, 157 ethnic (esunikku) cafés, 40, 63, 121 ethnic food, 124–125 European-style cafés: American cafés i­ nfluenced primarily by, 116, 118; as classless space, 23; and commerce, 24, 25, 26; and food in cafés, 122–123; as influence on early Japanese cafés, 17, 29, 47, 55–56, 179n3; initial Japanese cafés emulating, 29, 47, 56, 107, 175–176, 179n3; modernity and, 22, 56; origination of, 22; as penny university, 23, 25; and postwar Japanese cafés, 140; suspicion and suppression of, 23, 181nn7–8 exoticism, ikoku joocho (exotic mood), 47  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Factory Café (Kafekosen), 83–86, 84, 85, 175 family: café alleviating tensions of, 142–143, 147–148; demands of, 133; housewife and, 34, 35, 40, 134, 143–144, 145; and industrialization, 16; modernization of, 143–145; as nuclear vs. linear, 143; unemployment and, 147–148; as web, 129; of women café owners, 87. See also home fan clubs, 83 farmers and farming: coffee cupper (quality assurance), 103; drying and storage, 102– 103; fermentation, 102; grading for size, 102–103; picking coffee cherries, 102; and quality control, 102, 105 fashion, 52–53 fazendas (plantations), 98, 100  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

212  |  Index “feminine perfect,” 86–87 feminists and feminism: class status of, 63; meetings in cafés, 12–13, 63, 64; moga (modern girls) and, 49; post-feminism, 65; and relationships with men, 49 Fenellosa, Ernest, 57 fermentation of coffee, 102 Ferraiuolo, Augusto, 184n15 Filipino musicians, 59 filters and strainers, 80; drip tops, 110, 187n2; flannel (nel bag), 71, 110 First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), 99 flaneurs (boulevardiers), 12, 37, 44, 49, 132, 133, 153, 160 flapper (furappa) bob (danpatsu), 48, 53 flavored coffees, 113, 115, 120 Fontanesi, Antonio, 57 food: as aesthetic performance, 69, 183–184n5; breakfast (morning set), 29–30, 123–125, 142–143, 176–177; at “brown cafés,” 55; at Café Paulista, 45–46; at Chautara, 87; in ­classical-music cafés, 62; competition via, 124–125; crossover capacities of, 122–123, 187–188n14; curry (kare raisu), 108, 122, 123, 176; European-style café traditions and, 122–123; haikara, 123; Japanese cuisine as concept, 53; at Junko’s Kitchen, 86; licensing for, 123, 188n15, 190n38; locavore, 125; naturalization of, 91–92, 122–123, 187–188n14; not on offer, 72, 84; novelty and, 122–123; organic, 124–125; rules about foodways, 123, 187–188n14; saabisu (free goods), 124, 174, 187–188n14; scarcity during WWII, 64; served by kissaten vs. cafés, 29–30; shopping for, before refrigeration, 145; sweets, 123; in teahouses, 13, 14; time of day served, 125; traditional Japanese foods and, 123, 187n14; vegetarian, 125; yatai stalls under overhead train tracks, 12, 55, 166; yoshoku (Western), 31 Foucault, Michel, 12 Foujita, Leonard, 57–58 France: and community, cafés as providing, 148–149; and the country, value of, 135; culture and cafés of, 24–25; food in cafés, 122; and history of coffee, 94, 97, 185n7, 186n18; as influence on early Japanese cafés, 17, 29, 47, 55–56, 179n3; as influence on Japanese artists, 57–58; number of cafés in, 23–24; origination of coffee in, 22, 24–25; Paris as unifocal city, 135; popular notion of, as culturally superior, 55–56; strict control of coffee beans, 97; surveillance of cafés in, 25 franchise operations, 78, 102 François (café), 175–176  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Franklin W. Olin Institute of Engineering, 184n16 Frederick the Great, 23, 181n8 free goods (saabisu), 124, 174, 187–188n14 French East India Company, 185n7 French press coffee (cafetière), 80, 111 Friendship Trade and Navigation Treaty, 99 fuel prices, 105 fufu (husband-wife) projects, 75, 76 Fugetsudo (café), 43 Fujin Bungeigo (literary journal), 46–47 Fujin Koron (magazine), 51 Fuji Royal roaster, 89, 126 functions of cafés, 4, 6–7, 17; age and, 28; anabateki (hole in the wall) cafés, 54–55, 163, 164–168; anonymity, 37; and ­changing technologies, 24, 26, 27; diversity of types, 2–3, 5–6, 54–55, 65, 154, 161; and family, changes in, 143, 145; gender differences in, 28; as heterotopic locations, 12; identity, freedom from, 5, 35, 36, 133, 149, 154–156; as identity of cafés, 146; and longevity of cafés, 3, 17–18, 141–142, 154, 172; and naturalization of coffee and cafés, 28, 161; night people out for the night, 1; no exclusion of undefined uses, 164; novelty of café form and, 30; and novelty vs. predictability, 12, 139–140; and one’s need of the moment, 158; particularity and, 65; same clientele served by, 55; students and, 162–163; as waiting room, 35; work and workplace and, 11, 12, 13, 25, 27– 28, 154–155. See also community; solitude functions of one cafés, See also commerce; communication; community; politics; respite space, cafés as; solitude Furansu Monogatari (“Tales of France”, Nagai), 56 furiitaa (part-time freelance youth), 6–7 furnishings: of Bear Pond, 73; of Café Paulista, 45; of cafés, generally, 32, 36, 37; of Hachi Hachi Infinity Café, 177; of Jumpei, 157; of Kafekosen (Factory Café), 84; of kissaten, generally, 32, 44; modernity and, 32, 36; of Otafuku, 81; of Prinz, 177; tables and chairs, as novel, 16, 44; of women-owned cafés, 86  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

gallery-cafés, 40, 56, 57, 157–158, 163, 170, 177 Gans, Herbert, 133 gardens, Japanese, 156, 164 geisha, 50–51, 52–53, 114, 119 gender: and difference in café use, 28; early Japanese cafés catering to, 29; separation of spheres of activity based on, 34; and tastes in coffee, 113; and welcome lighting of city streets, 136–137  

 

 

 

Index  |  213 Germans and Germany: coffee masters sojourning in, 177; cups made in, 2; home ­roasting machines made in, 111; as importer/­consumer of coffee, 93, 99, 112, 179n1; Japanese writers sojourning in, 56; strength (density) of coffee preferred, 112, 113; warehoused coffee pre– World War II, 64, 100, 173 gift-giving, 96, 104 Gimme! (café), 74 ginbura (Ginza stroll), 136–137, 145 Ginza district: as bright-light district, 136–137, 145; Café Paulista of, 46; earthquake of 1923 and destruction of, 53; modernity taught in, 47; and public-private zones, 137; writers and disillusionment with, 54 Ginza Hacchome (Takeda), 51 global cities, 39–40 globalization/global market: coffee as first globalized commodity, 91; consumption patterns of, 105–107; distortions in, 106; Japan as agent of, 20, 91, 92–93; and “Japanese coffee”, desire for, 5, 20, 89–90, 118, 125– 126, 185n2, 187n2; and Japan, fascination with, 118; and rise of Japanese standards, 109; and sustainability, 111–112; Tokyo resistance to, 40 Gluck, Carol, 32 gold-leaf-flecked coffee, 153 goshinsui (sacred well water), 114 green tea (nihoncha), 119–122, 120, 174, 187n12. See also tea green tea ice cream, 120, 121, 123, 187n12 grinding beans: cup by cup, 71, 81, 111; mortar and pestle, 111 Guatemala, 84, 87, 107 Guatemalan Antigua beans, 84 Guiana, 97  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Habermas, Jürgen, 24, 26 Hachi Hachi Infinity Café, 148, 155, 177 haikara foods, 123 hairstyles, 48, 52, 53 Hanafusa (café), 67, 109, 114, 175 Hanako magazine, 79 handcrafted and handmade (tezukuri): and global desire for Japanese coffee, 125; and naturalization of novelty, 92; as performance, 116; taste for, 109, 116 hand-pour coffee, 71–72, 81–82, 83, 187n2 Hankyu stores, 137 Hario equipment, 90, 187n2. See also coffee equipment Harumi Befu, 92 Hasegawa Shigure, 47 Hawai’i (Kona coffee), 106, 107  

 

health: chocolate drinks and, 121; and city planning, 150; decaffeinated coffee and, 116; green tea and, 120, 121; medicinal value of coffee, 5, 94–97, 116, 119, 187n8 Hello Kitty, 92 hip-hop, 58, 69 Hi-Rise Café, 185n2, 206 Hirotsu Kazuo, 51 historical eras, as influence on cafés, 26–27 hobbies (shumi), 159–160 hole-in-the-wall (kakurega, anabateki) kissa, 54–55, 163, 164–168 Hollys (chain), 114 home: café as bridge to, 42; clutter in, 146, 160; as “first place,” 26; as location of reproduction vs. production, 34; modernity and distinction between work and, 34–35; and need for respite space, 11, 12, 25, 28; and need for study space, 168; normative significance of, 143; privacy of, and lack of accidental meetings, 134; privacy of, and use of cafés, 29, 35; safety of, and political activities in cafés, 63. See also family; neighborhoods homemade coffee: roasting beans, 111; types of coffee made, 110–111, 125; variables in, 110 honne vs. tatemae, 156, 190n39 hoojicha tea, 114 house blend (burendo), 112, 115 housewives, 34, 35, 40, 134, 143–144, 145 Howells, George, 184n12  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ice balls, 68 ice cream, 120, 121, 123, 187n12 iced coffee, 90, 110, 126 Ida Ichiro, 59 identity: adoption of Western culture and preservation of Japanese, 31; cafés and lack of, 56, 146; and church bells, 133; ­individualist ideas of, 42; male, 11, 34; and temple grounds as tied spaces, 131; use of cafés and freedom from, 5, 35, 36, 133, 149, 154–156 Ide Youemon, 95 idobata kaigi (well-side gathering place), 154, 163–164, 168–170 iemoto system, 72–73 Ienaga Junko, 86–87 iki, 152, 153 ikoku joocho (exotic mood), 47 Imperial Colonial Company of Japan, 100 imperial palaces, 38, 130, 137, 190n26 importers of coffee, rank of Japan as, 19 inakomono (rural person), 135 independent cafés: beans purchasing by, 78–79, 102; number of as decreasing, 28, 40, 76. See also kissaten  

 

 

 

 

 

214  |  Index India, 122, 123 individualism: and dependence, positively valued, 69; juxtaposed with community, 133; and master/café identity, 74–75; and need for cafés, 42 Indonesia, 63, 87, 104, 173 industrialization: and cities, view of, 135–136; and migrant workers’ use of cafés, 16, 32, 138; and rifts and dislocations, 138–139; and time, use of, 33–35; women workers and, 144–145 Inoda (café), 104 insect infestations, 93, 103 instant coffee, 46, 109–110, 117 Intelligentsia Coffee, 185n2 International Coffee Organization, 105 Italy, 111, 179n1  

 

 

 

 

 

kare raisu (curry), 108, 122, 123, 176 Kasato Maru (ship), 98 kata (proper form), 82, 119 Kato Coffee Company, 109 Kato Hidetoshi, 119 Kato, Satoru, 109–110, 186–187n1 Katsuragawa Hoshu, 94 kawaita meitei (dry inebriation), 60 Kazuko (café master), 87 KFC, 156 Kissa Soiree (café), 43, 175 kissaten: coffee as focus of, 170; density of numbers of, 190n38; distinguished from the café, 29–30, 32, 190n38; divergence from the café, 29, 53–54; furnishings of, 32, 44; holein-the-wall, 54–55, 163, 164–168; hours of, 30; jazz, 58–60, 108, 142, 176, 183n30; jun­ kissa (pure café), 29, 53–55, 162; milk halls as antecedent to, 43–44; no-pantsu, 65, 162; number of, 190n38; as ordinary, 32, 75, 88; post–World War II recovery of, 29; social and personal frames colliding in, 165; as term, 179n3 Kitahara Hakushu, 46 Klein, Yves, x Kobakura Yasuyoshi, 139 koban (police post), 130 Kobayashi Takiji, 84 Kobe: jazz and, 59–60; shape of city, 38 kodawari: and architecture, 68; Chin Souichi and, 62; as commerce vs. ritual, 68, 69, 80, 82, 85; corporate policy and, 70; as ­cultural logic of cafés, 154; defined, 66–68, 154; export of, 68; and Koyama Taiji, 77; and machines, 74; malleability of, 68; as normal and ordinary, 88; and perfection as aspirational vs. attainable, 69–70, 88; and relationship with recipients/buyers/customers, 67–68, 70; as required part of commodity, 73; stereotyping of, 68–69; suffering and, 66, 69, 154; translations of, 67; as unteachable, 76; women and, 83–88, 154 koku (body) of brew, 115 kokutai (national “essence”), 63 Kolshitsky, Franz George, 22, 89–90 Kona coffee, 106, 107 koohii. See coffee koohiihausu, as term, 179n3 koohii no odoogu. See tools of coffee koohiito, 16, 96 koohii zeri (coffee jelly), 123 Koots (drink company), 120–121 Koyama Taiji, 76–80, 170, 173–174 Kuroda Tatsuaki, 175 Kyoto: chonin culture, 15; clothing as focus of,  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jacob (at Oxford), 22 Jaho Café, 125, 126, 185n2 Jamaica, 106 Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee, 106, 107 Japan, fascination with, 118 jazz: centers of, 59–60; naturalized as Japanese, 59, 91; as sound track of modern life, 59; suppression of, 59 jazz age: modern girls and boys of, 48–49, 51, 137; urbanity and, 59 jazz kissa (cafés), 58–60, 108, 142, 176, 183n30 Jazz Promenade festival, 60 jokyuu. See waitresses Jokyuu (Hirotsu Kazuo), 51 joonetsu koojoo (passion factory), 52 Jump (kissaten), 147 Jumpei (café), 157–158, 168, 169, 205 junkissa (pure kissaten), 29, 53–55, 162 Junko’s Kitchen, 86–87  

 

 

 

 

 

Kabuki theater, 52–53, 152, 176 Kafe do Ramburu. See Café de l’Ambre Kafe Kisaragi, 47 Kafekosen (Factory Cafe), 83–86, 84, 85, 175 Kaffee Schnufflers, 23 Kaffe Wien, 97 kahii, as term, 179n3 Kahiichakan (coffeehouse), 3, 7–11, 8, 15, 16–17, 44, 161, 162, 179n3 Kahiisakan. See Kahiichakan (coffeehouse) kahvehane (Turkish cafés), 14, 15, 21–22 kakurega, anabateki (hole-in-the-wall) kissa, 54–55, 163, 164–168 kanban relationships, 78, 101–102 Kanikosen (Kobayashi), 84 kanten, 123 Kanto earthquake (1923), 30, 44, 53, 98, 131  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Index  |  215 135; as grid, 130; guide to cafés of, 174–177; number of kissaten in, 190n38; shape of city, 38; shopping routes of, 81; strength of coffee preferred, 113; and tripartite urbanity of Japan, 135; and World War II, 139 Kyoto Iced Coffee, 90, 126 Kyowa Coffee, 103  

Langbourne Coffee-House, 9 Laughing Stars, 59 Law on Public Assembly and Association (1890), 63 Lawrence, Robert, 101 leisure: multiple meanings and practices of, 160– 161; preservation of atmosphere of, 167. See also respite space, café as libraries, 168 literary journals, 46–47 Lloyd’s (coffeehouse), 24 locality: as brand, 111–112; as taste, 115 localization. See naturalization locavore foods, 125 Luminaire Bravo-i, 184n16 Lush Life (café), 108, 142, 176  

 

 

Marunouchi district, 137 Maruo Shuzo, 72, 101, 102, 190n38, 205 Maruyama Coffee Company, 103 Maruyama Kentaro, 103, 113 Maruyama Shozo, 47 Marxists and Marxism, 49, 63, 64 masters (maasutaa): authority of, 67; and barista as profession, 74, 75; as coffeemaniakku (“maniac”), 72, 173; connoisseurship of, 71– 74, 78–79, 80–82, 83–85, 184nn15–16; consistency of, 77–78; copy first, then innovate, 67, 104; earnings of, 75, 77, 78, 82; education of, 74, 75–76, 77, 82; eviction of c­ ustomers by, 71; fame of, 75, 80, 81; fan clubs, 83; individualism of, and identity of café, 74–75; lack of, at chain cafés, 169; lifelong dedication of, 76–77; love of craft as necessary to, 68, 74, 78; personality of, 71, 74–75, 103; pride of (shujin no kigurai), 73; as producer, craftsman, and artist combined, 68, 103–104; relationship with clientele, 67, 73, 74, 77–78, 82–83, 86, 88, 108, 127–128, 164–165, 166–167; and “schools of coffee”, lack of, 72–73, 80; sincerity of, 88; stylized performance of, 119; successors to, 78, 79–80; suffering of, 66, 69, 77, 154; taste of, 28; as term, 66, 72–73; women as, 83–88, 84, 157. See also blends; kodawari; management of cafés; tools of ­coffee (koohii no odoogu) matcha (powdered tea), 21, 72, 120, 121 matchbox designs, 81, 182n4 Matsuda Kouta, 121 Matsuya (department store), 137 Matsuzakaya (department store), 137 medicinal use of coffee, 5, 94–97, 116, 119, 187n8 Meiji period (1868–1912): bunmei kaika (civilization and enlightenment) program, 10, 93, 97, 162; and cities as magnets, 135–136; and classical music, 58; and cultural preservation, 30–32, 52–53, 56, 93, 96–97; diversification of cafés, 11–12, 56–57; high collar worn in, 123; kanban signs, 78; public spaces, development of, 36, 39; and status system, destruction of, 15; and tea ceremony, 119; and Tokyo as center of globalizing, 15–16; and transportation, 137; and Western art teachers in Japan, 57; and women, 144 meikyoku kissa (classical music cafés), 48, 58, 60–62, 61, 140, 177 melancholy, positive engagement with, 9, 141, 171 memory: cafés as sites of, 64–65, 140, 141; coffee reported to improve, 116 men: abekku relationships, 49, 145; coffee marketed to, 110; as customers of cafés, 7, 10, 15,  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

machines, vending, 3, 117–118, 120, 146, 148, 187n8. See also coffee equipment machizukuri movement, 150 Mackie, Vera, 37, 143 Macrae, Judson, 206 magazines, 6, 51, 79, 103, 144 maid cafés, 41 Maihime (Mori), 56 Maki, Fumihiko, 131 Makoto Koono, 150 malleability. See functions of cafés management of cafés: competition and, 75; educational courses in, 28, 75–76; failures, 75; as hobby-dream, 160; reasons for choosing, 74–76, 160; relationships with bean suppliers, 78, 79, 101–102; Tei Ei-kei and failures of, 10–11 manga, 6, 69, 92, 116, 118, 126, 147–148, 159, 162 manga-Internet cafés, 147–148 marketing: and corporate culture of coffee, 125; and decaffeinated coffee, 116; the elderly and leisure, 169. See also advertising market, Japanese: amount of coffee imported to Japan, 99, 113, 179n1, 186n20; consumption patterns of Japan and global market, 105–107; “managed predictability” in supply chain, 101; and naturalization of ideas and products, 91–92, 97; youth market, 113, 125. See also globalization/global market marking of Japanese spaces, 154, 156  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

216  |  Index men (continued) 16, 49, 161, 162, 166; identity of, and workplace, 11, 34 Meson Koonosu, 47, 55–56 “Metropolis and Mental Life” (Simmel), 132 Michelet, 25 middle class: and cafés, 140–141, 162; c­ reation of, 14–15, 136; early Japanese cafés c­ atering to, 29, 93; feminists as, 63; and home, ­seriousness of, 25; industrialization and, 136; and leisure, 160; modernity and, 36, 59; moga and, 48–49; the morning set (breakfast) and, 123–124; and railway transport, 138; slumming, 12, 14, 151–152; unemployment and, 147–148; and urban culture, creation of, 15; waitresses as, 52; women’s roles and, 42, 43, 143–145. See also classlessness Middle East, coffee and, 21 migrant Japanese workers: and Brazil, 5, 29, 45, 91, 98–100, 105, 186n25; cafés as educational for, 16, 32, 138; from countryside to city, 16, 144–145; kin-linked migration, 16; morning set (breakfast) and, 124 military, 93–94, 99, 122 milk, 10, 14, 43–44, 72, 96, 97, 117, 121 milk halls (miruku horu), 14, 43–44 Minamihara Chiyoki, 186n25 miruku horu (milk halls), 14, 43–44 missionaries and traders, 7, 17, 24, 94, 97 Mister Donut, 168–169 Mitsukoshi (department store), 137 Mitsukoshi Department Store café, 43 Miyako Saboo (café), 49 Mizuno Ryu, 45–46, 98, 100, 173 mizushobai (“water trades”), 13–14, 15, 152–153, 190n34 Mo-An (café), 170, 171, 174, 205 mobo (modern boys), 48, 49, 137 modan (modern) style, 32, 141 modernism (modanizumu), jazz and, 59, 183n30 modernity: absence of responsibility for its display, 153; convergences in, 36; defined, 37, 141; and distinction between home and work, 34–35; European-style cafés and, 22, 56; improvisational, 32; Japanese, advent of, 162; learning of, 56; milk halls and, 43; and mobile labor force, 91; moga (modern girls) and, 48–49; as move from ­connection to disconnection, 133; multiplicity of modernities, 33; as nostalgic aesthetic, 36–37; and novelty, 161, 162; presence in café as act of, 42–43, 49; public spaces as important to, 37; and solitude, 44, 133; teaching of, 47; trance of, 37; untetheredness as risk of, 141; as urban, 32; waitresses as embodiment and  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

purveyors of, 48, 49, 51–52; Westernization conflated with and then diverging from, 3, 4, 9, 161, 162 modernization: and café as third space, 25; defined, 33; and desire for selective cultural change, 30–32; and time, 33–35 moga (modern girls), 48–49, 51, 137 Mokka beans, 2, 93, 94 Monami (café), 49 Mori, Minoru Mori, 149–150, 190n26 Morimoto Reo, 169–170, 170 Mori Ogai, 46, 56 morning set (mooningu setto, breakfast), 29–30, 123–125, 142–143, 176–177 motor vehicles, effect on neighborhoods, 132 movies, 140 muongaku (“no-music”) café, 60 Murayama, Yuka, 70 music: at Café Paulista, 46; casual (buskers), 12, 14, 152; at clubs, 1; drowned out by voices, 57; as quiet, 7; as scenery, 170 music cafés: classical music, 48, 58, 60–62, 61, 140, 177; dansu kissa, 60; and foreign innovation, 27; jazz kissa, 58–60, 108, 142, 176, 183n30; ongaku kissa, 60; utagoe kissaten, 60  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nagai Kafuu, 47, 51, 53–54, 56, 57 Nagasaki, 15 Nagoya, 113 nakama (friendship group at school), 165, 166–167 Nakamuraya (curry house), 123 names, Japanese, xii Naomi (Tanizaki), 51 national “essence” (kokutai), 63 naturalization as Japanese: of food, 91–92, 122– 123, 187–188n14; of jazz, 59, 91; modernity, 140; and novel ideas and commodities, 59, 91–92 naturalization of coffee and cafés as Japanese: cultural organization facilitating, 91–92; and Japanese travelers, 97; and modernization, 33; and multiplicity of functions of cafés, 28, 161; and novelty, 59, 91–92; rapid development of, 3, 4, 5, 17, 20, 31; and shopping clusters, 40 neighborhoods: accidental contacts within, 132, 134, 145; apartment dwellers and, 129, 131– 132, 134; collective inner space, loss of, ix, 131–132, 134; ethnic, 133; and motor vehicles, introduction of, 131, 132; and “not-seeing,” 165; older, use of cafés in, 35–36; ­roasting companies of, 111, 176; and shitamachi (urban villagers), 133–134, 136, 138; and ­shotengai, 40, 129, 131, 145, 146, 151, 189n22;  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Index  |  217 as walkable, 145, 151; as web, 129–130. See also cities nekura (dark-souled), 146, 165 nel bag, 71, 110 neo-Nihoncha, 120–121 Netherlands and the Dutch: and Brazilian coffee, 97; and coffee as trading commodity, 94; development of varieties, 94; plantations of, 94; strength of coffee drunk by, 112; strict control of coffee, 97 newspapers, 27 New York City, 58, 74 nihoncha. See green tea Nihon Sumo Kyokai, 14 Ninth Street Expresso (café), 74 Nishibori Shin, 177 Nishimura Tsurukichi (Tei Ei-kei), 8–11, 8, 44, 97, 100, 162 Noda-san, 74, 81–83, 83, 85, 116, 176, 205 nodogoshi (aftertaste), 72, 115 Noh theater, 52, 184n14 “no-music” cafés, 60 “no-pantsu“ kissa, 65, 162 no-place place, 154, 158, 163, 164–168 Norberg, Jakob, 21 nostalgia: and modernity, 141; for Tsuta café, 79; for utopian agrarian society, 149. See also retro cafés nostalgia cafés, 41; and authority of heritage, 115; Bauhaus style and, 37; the elderly and, 169; modernity and, 36–37; Otafuku and elements of, 81; period cafés, 114–115; roasting over natural charcoal, 114; sepia cafés, 3, 140, 170, 173–174; siphon coffee and, 114; tatami matting as furnishings in, 44 not-seeing, 128, 131, 134, 142, 153, 155–156, 165–166 novelty, 15; chain cafés not able to offer, 65; continuation of, 30; department stores as, 137–138; of modernity, 161, 162; naturalization of, 59, 91–92; performance of, 42; possibility of, 27, 65; predictability and, 12, 128– 129, 139–140, 152  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

office ladies (OL), 118 Ogawa Coffee, 111 ongaku kissa, 60 Oota Shokuzan (Oota Nambo), 96 organic products: as café focus, 7, 24–25, 40, 87, 121, 176, 177; coffee, 87, 111; food, 124–125, 177; green tea, 121; kodawari and, 68; milk, 121; new markets for, 111 orthopraxy, 80, 184n15 Osaka: anabateki cafés of, 166; anonymity together with good coffee, 166; cabaretstyle cafés and waitresses of, 53; earthquake  

 

of 1923 and effect on cafés, 30, 53–54; food as focus of, 135; jazz and, 59–60; ­number of kissaten in, 190n38; railway-owned department stores in, 137; shape of city, 38; strength of coffee preferred, 113; suppression of dance halls in, 59; and tripartite urbanity of Japan, 135; waitress union in, 53 Osaka Jokyuu Doomei, 53 Otafuku (café), 74, 81–83, 83, 116, 176, 205 otaku, 165, 189n16  

 

 

Pan no Kai (Society of Pan), 46 Parietta, Francisco de Mero, 186n18 parks, 26, 36, 38, 39, 135, 146, 150, 153 Pascal (coffee purveyor), 24 passion factory (joonetsu koojoo), 52 pedicure cafés, 41 penny universities, 23, 25 People’s Theaters (taishu engeki), 14 Pepys, Samuel, 23 perfectionism, stereotypes of, 68–69 performance-art cafés, 33 period cafés, 114–115 pesticides, 93 pet cafés, 40–41 plantations: coffee cupper (quality assurance), 103; workers of, 91, 97–100, 186n25. See also farmers and farming play (asobi), 42 poetry, tanka, 46 police post (koban), 130 politics, 12–13; and American Revolution, 25; postrevolutionary 1980s, 65, 74; surveillance of cafés, 25; suspicion of teahouses, 119–120; teahouses and, 119–120; utagoe kissaten and, 60, 64. See also feminists and feminism; suppression and suspicion of cafés Portuguese and Portugal, 5, 10, 17, 46, 94, 97, 186n18 post–World War II: cheerfulness of cafés in, 55; proliferation of café styles during, 163; recovery of cafés and, 64, 139, 140, 162; recovery of kissaten in, 29. See also World War II powdered tea (matcha), 21, 72, 120, 121 predictability: coffee industry and management of, 101, 105, 107, 108–109; novelty vs., and cities, 128–129, 139–140, 152; and respite, 155; of transportation systems, 128–129 price: of a cup, 10, 75, 79, 82, 87, 104–105, 113, 139; of beans, 104, 187n3; discounts, 104; of fuel, and coffee production, 105; of gifts, 104; as indicator of quality, 104; of morning set (breakfast), 124; of sojourn in manga/ Internet café, 148  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

218  |  Index primogeniture, 16 Prince (café), 49 Prinz (café), 163, 177 private-in-public space: chain cafés and, 168; coffee as beverage associated with, 4; and freedom from identity, 35, 36; and hole-inthe-wall cafés, 163, 164; as modernist, 36, 44; and music, listening to, 140; shift to, from social space, 20. See also anonymity; solitude Le Procope (café), 24, 47 production, high cost of, 105 Proletarian Visual Arts Movement, 183n25 prostitutes, 5, 12, 95, 152, 190n34. See also eroticism and sexuality Prussia, suppression of cafés, 23, 181n8 public baths, 36, 129, 134, 141 public culture, and shifts between private and public zones, 130–131 Public Peace Maintenance Law, 63 public social spaces: cafés opening up, 4, 16–17, 161; creation of, by use vs. design, 38–39; as important to modernity, 37; lack of, in Japan, 37–38; Meiji period development of, 36, 39; spontaneous and semispontaneous meetings in, 39. See also private-in-­public space pure café (junkissa), 29, 53–55, 162 purin (crème caramel), 55, 122

retirees: as café owners, 75, 76, 169; and community, need for, 34, 162–163, 169–170; households and, 134; young-retired, 76 retro cafés. See nostalgia cafés retro teahouses, 121 revolution. See politics rice, 150, 187–188n14, 190n26 Richie, Donald, 5, 27 Rihou (café), 157–158, 158, 168, 169 roads, construction of, 131–132 roasting beans: calibration of, 112; charcoal roasted (sumiyaki), 114; and deficiencies in newer bean varieties, 107; and early development of coffee culture, 96; for espresso, 73; at home, 111; by independents vs. commercial distributors, 79; Japanese technology for, 89, 126; medium roast as preferred, 112; neighborhood roasting companies, 111, 176; predictability in, 109; shock of, recovery of beans from, 71, 111; small and frequent schedules, return to, 107; small batches, 71 Roba (café), 169–170 Robertson, Jennifer, 149 Rokumeikan (Deer Cry Pavilion), 10, 162 Roppongi Hills, 149, 190n26 Rosee, Pasqua, 22–23 Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), 99, 137 ryosai kembo (“good wife, wise mother”), 144 Ryugetsudo (café), 48, 61–62, 61, 177

quality: coffee cupper as tester/taster, 103; economies leading to reduction in, 105; and food offerings, 125; high standards for, 92, 102– 104; as “Japanese,” 154; price as indicator of, 104; and return of customers, 170; and rise of global standards, 109; trust as ­crucial in, 102

saabisu (free goods), 124, 174, 187–188n14 Sa-chan (Sarasa-san), 5, 83–86, 84, 175 sakariba (animated spaces), 11–12, 14, 53–54, 136–137, 151–152 sake, 187–188n14 sakoku jidai (closed country period), 94 samurai, 10, 15, 16, 77, 97, 184n14 Sand, Jordan, 143 Sangiovanni, A., 57 Sassen, Saski, 39–40 satogashi, 96–97 Schyndel, Jaime van, 89, 125–126, 206 Seattle: coffee boom driven by, 6, 19, 45, 88, 91, 120–121, 154; coffee style and products of, 115, 118, 120; Tei Ei-kei and, 10–11 seken (watchful community presence), 165–166 Sekiguchi Ichiro, 70–73, 76, 77, 80, 103, 119, 173, 184n12 Seki Hajime, 150 sekuhara cafés, 65 Sennett, Richard, 150–151 sensei, as term, 66 sepia cafés, 3, 140, 170, 173–174 service: as “Japanese,” 4, 154; and naturalization

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

railroad. See transportation (railroad and subway) Raz, Aviad, 70 “red-haired” foreigners, 94, 95 Reed, Steven, 68 Rengagai (Bricktown) development, 136 respite space, cafés as, 4; commuting distances and, 35; and corporate identity, 34–35; and facilitation of participation in home and work, 13, 25; Japanese coding of, 155; and male worker idendity, 11; from mizushobai (water trades) activities, 153; and predictability, 155; and solitude, 141; as “third space” function, 26; and WWII, 64 respite space, need for, 130 restaurants, cafés distinguished from, 122, 123, 125, 188n15  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Index  |  219 of novelty, 92; table, as new, 16; tea as sign of hospitality, 120 settlement house cafés, 138 sexual harassment laws, 65 sexuality. See eroticism and sexuality shakkei (borrowed landscape), 51, 154, 164, 167, 170 Shibata Tokue, 33, 130, 131 shimetta meitei (“wet” inebriation), 60 Shinbasi Station, 137 Shinjuku Gyoen, 39 shinkuu kansoohoo (vacuum-dried instant ­coffee), 110 Shinshindo (café), 20, 169, 174–175 Shin-Umeda station, 166 Shiowaza Yukito, 87–88 Shirokiya (dry-goods store), 137–138 Shiseido Company, 43 shitamachi (urban villager) areas, 133–134, 136, 138 Shively, Donald, 13 shoji anonymity, 134, 155–156 shopping street (shotengai), 40, 129, 131, 145, 146, 151, 189n22 shotengai (shopping street), 40, 129, 131, 145, 146, 151, 189n22 Showa period (1926–1989): flaneurs of, 153; matchbox designs, 182n4 shujin no kigurai (pride of the master), 73 shumi (hobbies), 159–160 sidewalks, 146 signage, 81, 84, 102, 176 Silverberg, Miriam, 37, 52 Simmel, George, 132 single-bean coffees, 105–106 siphon coffee, 67, 75–76, 80, 90, 110–111, 114, 175, 185n2 slaves, African, 97–98, 99 slow-filter coffee, 90, 185n2 Smith, Henry, 135, 150 Smithsonian Institute’s Migratory Bird ­Center, 111 smoking, 10, 62 social change: and café as “third space,” 12, 18, 25, 30; migrations from rural areas, 136; modernization and desire for selectivity in, 30–32; and naturalization of novelty, 92; and preservation vs. obliteration of older cultural forms, 21; and status of waitresses, 50–51; and urban transformations, 136. See also politics social conventions, 22, 27, 48 social media, 7 Society for the Promotion of Immigration, 98 solitude, need for: and aloneness (sabishisa) vs.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

untetheredness, 141, 146, 165, 171, 189n16; and café as third space, 44, 127–128; ­coffee as beverage associated with, 4; freedom from performance and, 27; as Japanese ­sensibility, 141; lack of opportunities for ­solitude, 7, 27, 146, 165; modernity and, 44, 133; and personal space, management of, 167; as positive value, 165; as socially suspect, 165; and space, lack of, 27; and wabisabi (alone-together feeling), 135, 141, 171. See also anonymity; private-in-public space “The Song of the Waitress,” 51 spa cafés, 41 space: becoming place, 158; as both utopian and atopian, 168; lack of, in Japan, 27, 146; personal, 167; rental of, at Café Paulista, 46 Spain, 93–94 speakeasy-type café, 29, 33 sports drinks, 117 Starbucks (sutaabakusu, staabaa), 2–3, 6, 28, 33, 74, 105–106, 110, 115, 118, 160–161, 164, 167 stations. See transportation stem family structure, 16 stereotypes of Japanese: clutter-free living spaces, 146; perfectionism, 68–70 stick girls (paid escorts), 49 strength (density) (koi/usui) of coffee, 112–113, 115 students: of art, 57; art made by, for art café, 87– 88; arubaito (part-time work), 87–88, 166, 169; benkyobeya (study-hall cafés), 167–168; diversity of, 54; nakama (friendship group at school), 165, 166–167; protests of, 13, 174– 175; school regulations on use of cafés, 29; slumming by, 14; and use of cafés, 2, 28–29, 54, 64, 162–164, 167–169 stuffed animals, 61, 62 Subaru (Pleiades), 46 subarugai (constellation of food and rest stalls), 55 substitute coffee (daiyoo koohii), 64, 100, 139 subway. See transportation (railroad and subway) “subway service,” 50 sugar, 16, 45, 72, 117 Suga Toshiko, 9 Sugimoto-san, 147 sumigokochiyoki toshi (livable city), 150 Sumitomo Company, 111 sumiyaki (charcoal roasted coffee), 114 sumo wrestling, 14 sumptuary laws, 15 suppression and suspicion of cafés: in England, 23, 181n7; in Japan, 4, 53, 62–64; in Prussia, 23, 181n8; teahouses, 119–120  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

220  |  Index suppression of art, music, and literary works, 56, 59 sushi, 71, 116, 119, 124, 187–188n14 sustainability, 111–112, 151 Suzuki Yoshio, 82  

 

“table service,” 54 Taisho period (1912–1926): and cabaret ­qualities in cafés, 29, 47–53; and city life, image of, 151; country people using cafés in, 139; democracy and, 47–48; diversification of coffee places, 11–12, 43–44, 56–57; and education, 139; flaneurs of, 153; matchbox designs, 1824; modernity and, 32, 37; nostalgia for, 118; and recording technology, 58; road construction in, 131; and waitresses, 53; and women in the workplace, 144–145 taishu engeki (People’s Theaters), 14 Takarazuka Revue orchestra, 59 Takashimaya (department store), 137 Takeda Rintaro, 51 Takeo Doi, 69 Tale of the Forty-seven Ronin (Chushingura), 77, 184n14 Tanaka, Chisa, 73 Tanaka, Katsuyuki, 73–74, 76, 81, 174 tanka poetry, 46 Tardits, Manuel, 137 taste: elites and democratization of, 15; and exclusivity of the local and particular, 110; for handcrafted and handmade, 109, 116; in leisure activities, 160; of the owner, and guises of the café, 28; for specialty coffee, global affect of, 109; trust and, 108 tatemae vs. honne, 156, 190n39 Tateno Shoichi, 175–176 taxes, import tax, 96 tea: and American Revolution, 25; and the Dutch, 94; in everyday life, 121; fading importance of, 118–120; green tea ice cream, 120, 121, 123, 187n12; industry magazines, 103; matcha (powdered tea), 21, 72, 120, 121; medicinal value of, 119; as nonoverlapping with coffee, 120; roasted, 114; tea served gratis in, 120, 174; trends in, 120–122; Western tea parlors, 63 tea ceremony: coffee drinking distinct from, 21; as not relevant to coffee practices, 71, 72, 80, 82, 88; rise of, 119; wabi-sabi of, 141 teahouses (chaya): as antecedent to cafés, 4–5, 13, 14–17, 30, 44, 161, 179n3; and community, 4–5, 14, 17; development of, 13; eroticism and, 121; eroticism and sexuality and (iro chaya), 13–14; food served in, 13, 14; formal (chakan), 179n1; inability to change, 141;  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

koshikake chaya (wayside respite huts), 13; nicknames given in, 14; ninai chaya (shrine and temples), 13; number of, in Edo period, 119; replaced by cafés, 44, 121; retro, 121; shibai chaya (theater tea stalls), 13–14; sumo chaya (sumo wrestling), 14; as suspect by authorities, 119–120; tebiki chaya (introduction teahouses), 13; trends in, 120, 121 Tei Ei-kei (Nishimura Tsurukichi), 7–11, 8, 44, 97, 100, 162 temperature: of coffee, 73, 184n12; of water, 71 temples and shrines: grounds of, 36, 38, 39, 82, 131, 132, 141, 146; and history of coffee, 95; sacred well water, 114 Terashita Tatsuo, 10 terroir, 103, 106, 111, 121 tezukuri. See handcrafted and handmade theater, 13–14, 52–53, 152, 176, 184n14 Thévenot, Jean de, 94 third space, café as, 159; civil society fueled by, 26; defined, 26; and site and duty, imperatives of, 27–28; social change and rise of, 12, 18, 25, 30; and solitude, need for, 44, 127–128 Thomson, James, 189n10 Three Points (café), 64 Thumberg, Carl Peter, 94–95 time: lack of, 132–133, 134, 146; modernization and, 33–35; nature of, 57; use of, 28 Tipton, Elise, 32, 33, 42, 51, 53 tobacco, 10, 62 Tokugawa period. See Edo period Tokyo (Edo): centrality of, and globalization, 15–16; and earthquakes, 30, 44, 53–54, 98, 131, 136, 145; focus of, 135; globalization, resistance to, 40; guide to cafés of, 173–174; and lanes (roji), 131–132; navigation in, difficulty of, 130; number of cafés in, 44, 146; number of kissaten in, 190n38; public spaces in, 39; shape of city, 38, 131–132; strength of coffee preferred, 11; and tripartite urbanity of Japan, 135; uniqueness of, 135; urban culture, creation of, 15; as web, 130 Tokyo Station, 137 Tokyo Tower, 39 Tomoe Yabe, 183n25 Tomoshibi (café), 60 tools. See coffee equipment tourists, 41, 75, 167, 177 traders and missionaries, 7, 17, 24, 94, 97 tradition: of theater and cuisine, 14, 52–53; ­waitresses relegating geisha to, 52, 53. See also naturalization as Japanese train stations. See transportations transportation (railroad and subway): anonymity and cafés of, 166; and cafés, inception  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Index  |  221 of, 4–5; commerce zones surrounding stations of, 137; department stores owned by rail companies, 137; foods, bento boxes of, 156; marking as Japanese, 156; and morning set (breakfast), 123–124; and multiplicity of needs served by cafés, 27; overhead train tracks, 55; pilgrimage routes, 38; predictability of, 128–129; railway workers’ cafés, 64– 65; and respite/transition space, café as, 35; and social spaces, passing through, 127; station cafés, 29, 166; stations, as public spaces, 36, 38, 137, 146; and time, use of, 33–34. See also cities trust: of customer for master, 70, 73, 108, 116; and disasters, 93, 105; importance of, in coffee industry, 79, 102, 105, 115, 116; kodawari and, 68, 70, 73; of price as indicator of quality, 104; vs. legal contracts, 102 Tsugaru-han, 96 Tsuji Takao, 103 Tsukiji (café), 17, 176 Tsuta (café), 76–80, 170, 173–174 Tsuzuki Hitoshi, 174–175 Tully’s (café), 121 Turkey, cafés (kahvehane) of, 14, 15, 21–22 Typica beans, 107  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

UCC (Ueshima Coffee Company), 78, 90, 106, 107, 116, 117 Uekusa Junichi, 45 Ueno Park, 39 Ueshima Coffee Company (UCC), 78, 90, 106, 107, 116, 117 ukiyo-e art, 152 umeboshi (pickled plum), 96 unemployment, 7, 147–148 unions, waitresses, 53 United States: artists and writers sojourning in, 58; barista as profession in, 75; brewed coffee and, 116; and chai, 121; cities of, 135, 136, 145, 150; and coffee as revolution, 9, 25; and community, cafés and need for, 20, 26, 127, 128; as consumer of coffee, 99, 112, 179n1; decaffeinated coffee and, 115, 116; espresso and, 116; and ethnic neighborhoods, 133; European styles as primary influence in, 116, 118; flavored coffees and, 115; and food, 122, 123, 18712; and green tea, 120, 187n12; house blends and, 115; instant coffee and, 109–110; Japanese coffee culture as separate from, 90–91, 107; “Japanese coffee” popularity in, 5, 20, 89–90, 118, 125–126, 185n2, 187n2; jazz of, 59; and the local as globally desirable, 111–112; machine for handcrafted coffee developed in, 184n16; and public social  

 

 

 

 

 

space, 39; single-bean coffees and, 105–106, 115; stereotypes of Japanese perfectionism, 68–69; strength of coffee in, 112, 113; Tei Eikei and, 9, 10–11, 44; temperature of c­ offee, 72, 73 urbanity: and Ginza stroll, 136–137; Japanese meaning of, 37; jazz and, 59; and origination of cafés, 30, 93; and side-by-side engagement (parallel play), 150–151; Western meaning of, 37. See also flaneurs utagoe kissaten (music café), 60, 64 utopias and utopianism, 149, 150, 168  

 

 

 

 

vacuum-dried instant coffee (shinkuu ­kansoohoo), 110 vending machines, 3, 117–118, 120, 146, 148, 187n8 Venice, 22, 94 vertical integration, 10, 101, 106 Vienna, 17, 22, 29, 33, 64, 89–90, 94, 97 Vienna (café), 140 Village in the Vaucluse (Wylie), 148 Vogel, Ezra, 16 Voltage (café), 185n2 von Siebold, Philipp Franz, 95–96  

 

 

wabi-sabi (aesthetic of transience and rusticity), 135, 141, 171 waitresses (jokyuu): as alienated labor, 52; blackmailing customers, 47; class status of, 50–51, 52; clothing of, 50, 52, 53; as distraction, 162; early cafés offering, 47; as embodiment and purveyors of modernity, 48, 49, 51–52; eroticism and sexuality as currency of, 47, 49–53, 54, 65; fame of, 51; and fashion, 52–53; geisha compared to, 50–51, 52–53, 119; hairstyles of, 53; as modern girls (moga), 51; and nopantsu kissa, 65, 162; numbers of, 53; and sekuhara cafés, 65; stage names of, 49; “subway service,” 50; “table service,” 54; unionizing, 53; and writers and artists, 47, 49–50, 51–52, 53–54. See also cabaret-style cafés wakon yosai (Japanese spirit, Western technology), 31, 96 water: boiled cup by cup, 71, 81; sacred well (goshinsui), 114; temperature of, 71 Waters, Thomas, 136 water trades (mizushobai), 13–14, 15, 152–153, 19034 way of coffee, 21, 71, 80 Web sites: Deep Kyoto, 177; fan clubs with, 83; Kayama’s coffee bean sales via, 79; and new generation of cafés, 40 well-side gathering place (idobata kaigi), 154, 163–164, 168–170  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

222  |  Index Western influence: bunmei kaika (­civilization and enlightenment) program, 10, 93, 97, 162; city development, 39; commodity and trends retaining foreign identity, 5; modernism conflated with, and divergence from, 3, 4, 9, 161, 162; modernization and desire for selective cultural change, 30–32. See also European-style cafés Western tea parlors, 63 white collar workers. See middle class Wirth, Louis, 133 women: abekku relationships of, 49, 145; as customers of cafés, 7, 15, 42–43, 55, 58; geisha, 50–51, 52–53, 114, 119; and kodawari, 83–88, 154; as masters and café owners, 83–88, 84, 157; and middle class, 143–145; as migrant workers to Brazil, 99; modernity embodied by, 48–49; moga (modern girls), 48–49, 51, 137; serving tea in workplace, 118; smiling conventions for, 48; stick girls, 49; as supporters of the arts, 58; as suspicious of coffee, 23; tastes in coffee, 113; “wise women,” 86; working-class, 16, 144–145. See also feminists and feminism; hairstyles; waitresses work and the workplace: café as bridge to, 42; instant coffee served in, 110; kodawari as concept in corporate, 70; and male identity, 11, 34; modernity and distinction between home and, 34–35; office ladies (OL), 118; overtime pay rate and café time, 13; pressure for performance and loyalty in, and need for third space, 11, 12, 13, 25, 27–28, 154–155; as “second place,” 26; status distinction of coffee, 118; tea and, 118; and time, use of, 33–35. See also migrant workers  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

working class: and healthy city planning, 150; women and, 16, 144–145 World Coffee Company, 64 World War II: scarcity of coffee and food ­during, 64, 100, 139. See also post–World War II writers, artists, and intellectuals (bunkajin): and Café Paulista, 46; financial support for, 58; and iki, 152; interpretation of cafés for others, 140; and junkissa (pure café), 53–54; needs served by cafés, 56–57, 58; and politics, 58, 18325; sojourning in Europe and Shanghai, 4, 57–58, 97, 140; and waitresses and cabaret-style cafés, 47, 49–50, 51–52, 53– 54; Western art teachers in Japan, 57 Wylie, Lawrence, 148–149  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

yakuza, 134 Yamaguchi brothers, 100 Yamanaka, Keiko, 99 Yamanote train line, 138 Yamatoya (jazz kissaten), 60 Yanaka Coffee, 111 Yano, Christine, 35 yatai food stalls, 12, 55, 166 Yemen, 2, 71, 94, 97 Yokohama: coffee warehoused during WWII, 64; foreign concessions of, 137; jazz and, 59–60 Yoshii Isamu, 46 Yoshimune (shogun), 94 Yoshimura Motoo, 158 yoshoku (Western food), 31 youth: education of, 139; furiitaa (part-time freelancers), 6–7; as market, 113, 125  

 

 

Text 10/13 Sabon Displ ay Sabon Com p osi tor BookMatters, Berkeley I n de x e r Victoria Baker P r i n t e r a n d Bi n de r Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group