Twenty Years In Japan cafe's and Kissaten Twenty years ago there were no cafe's in Japan. There were one or two that came close - I'm thinking particularly of cafe Rope in Aoyama, which still exists. I'm being a bit Tokyo - centric here so there may in fact have been a real cafe somewhere in Japan that I am not aware of. But certainly the numbers would be insignificant. What Japan did have in abundant numbers was another of those unique twists on foreign culture that we who live here for any period of time come to know and love: the Kissaten.

Now this essay is not about Kissaten despite the title. This essay is about cafe's. But in the interests of understanding white by a comparison with black, a brief history and description of the Kissaten is in order.

By the time I arrived in Japan in1983, there were basically two types of Kissaten. One type could almost be thought of as a dinner with an extremely limited menu and no chance of finding anything that you actually wanted. What it came down to was this; 3 coffee variations - something called 'blendo' (blend), "American" (watered-down 'bend'), and "ice" (which is actually a French or Italian roast coffee but only available cold and only in the summer months); one or two types of tea; something called a 'cream soda' that for some reason was always bright green and very sweet; something called a 'mix sando' (mixed sandwich) that always consisted of white bread with all the crust cut off, stacked in three layers (never 2), and thinly filled with cucumber, boiled egg and lots of mayonnaise. If you got to the Kissaten before 9:00am, you could usually get a "morning set" which consisted of coffee (choice of "bend" or American) or tea, one hard-boiled egg, a small salad usually of a few lettuce leaves and a tomato slice, and something called toast. This so-called toast was always the thickness of one third of a loaf of white bread, toasted on one side, and accompanied by a slab of margarine in gold foil and perhaps a little plastic tub of jelly. The thought of having to settle for the "morning set", after desperately scouring the neighborhood for something like a Denny's, still makes me gag.

The other type of Kissaten was that in which they tortuously dripped (squeezed?) your coffee through a sieve while ever so slowly pouring hot water from a sort of a watering can, or else boiled it over a Bunsen burner in some kind of a chemistry set looking contraption. Ostensibly this was all for the purpose of producing a delicious cup of coffee. But I suspect that the excruciatingly long period of time it took before you could actually drink your coffee was in some way adding value. After all, there was little else to warrant the 700 to 900 yen price of that simple cup 'o jo. Certainly it was neither the multicolored, star-shaped sugar, nor the delicate porcelain patterned-and-gilded coffee cup. If there was anything that deserved the price tag, it may have been the very Kissaten itself. For the Japanese Kissaten was not simply a place to drink coffee.; it was a place to imbibe culture, history and dreams.

That famous American dispenser of coffee and light cuisine Horn & Harduct had a slogan to appeal their brand of low cost, no-frills eatery: "You can't eat atmosphere". But the very existence of the Kissaten rested on the ability to serve up atmosphere so thick you could cut it with a knife. Like "Fahrenheit 451" where everyman became a book in order to preserve the culture, every Kissaten was a microcosm of some small segment of world culture. A kind of open-ended time capsule that preserved the past while continuing to compile a very very narrow band of the present. There were "Jazz Kissatens" like the famous Shinjiku haunt "Dug" (past tense of dig as in "dig it man"), with its deep collection of Jazz records and memorabilia, especially photos of jazz creates taken by owner Hozumi Nakadaira, along with a small sample of his enormous collection of wall-mounted pendulum clocks.

Similarly there were Kissatens specializing in every type of music, art, collecting fetish or hobby. One of my favorites is the NASA Kissaten located on Route 11 in Tokushima prefecture on Shikoku. This is a full-size reproduction of the space shuttle, mounted on its booster fuel tank, lying on in its side next to the road, awaiting your order to launch on a cup of mocha and a hot corn muffin.

Naturally, one of the most popular types of Kissaten was the "Manga Kissa" where one could read and reread ones favorites, stretching that cup of coffee into hours of passive entertainment. For the Japanese Kissa was never a place to hurry-along but a place too while-away. A place where time passed by unaccounted for.

As a more or less typical Italian-American New Yorker, I appreciate a slow cup of java as well as the next man. In 1986 when I designed the interior of a tiny, 4.5 tatami mat space to be used as a meeting room and gallery called "Kobo", I wrote (in reference to the many Brooklyn pizza-parlors with a small restaurant in the back that inspired my design), that "An essential aspect implicit in the experience, was the chance of a conversation with an acquaintance who happened to stop by, or the possibility of a new encounter". From my perspective, dark, quiet places were good for "private" conversations over coffee, while sitting at a table in an open cafe was good when you were alone and on the prowl or in a people-watching mood. In Japan 20 years ago, there was little or no conversation over coffee and absolutely no people watching at an open cafe. That, as they say, is history.

I would like to mention my own modest contribution in relation to the revolution in coffee dispersion, which has happened over the last 10 years. In 1991 I designed an open cafe called "Las Chicas" which I am happy to say still exists as of this writing. It included a totally outdoor space configured like a garden, and a semi-interior space wrapped in an "L" shape around that garden, with a facade consisting of accordion doors. There was nothing like this in Tokyo and it brought out the copycats in droves. Since that time the open cafe has become the standard.

In fact, as with every other trend in Japan and especially in Tokyo, it's either nothing at all or much too much of the same thing. Today, even McDonald's has tables outdoors whenever it can steal the space. Open cafe's have sprouted up everywhere, from the noisiest carbon monoxide-laden thoroughfares, to the tightest impassable back street. And along with this boom has come another: the "chain-ten" cafe boom.

Having alluded to my own modest work as the fountainhead of this movement, I will now attempt to elaborate the real reasons for the change. First of all, the new affluence experienced by the Japanese in the '80s brought with it an ability to attempt to quench that unquenchable thirst for all things foreign. People who had previously never owned a passport became frequent flyers overnight. And people who once thought Dotour was the best coffee they ever tasted, became habitue's of Les Deux Magots in Paris. The flipside of this was that foreigners heard more and more of the 10 dollar cup of coffee common in Japan, and began to see dollar signs, along with the stars, in the eyes of their newly enamored customers. Indeed, Les Deux Magots became one of the first famous foreign cafe's in Japan when it opened its doors in Tokyo's Shibuya district in the late 1980's - haughty French waiter, 10-dollar cup of coffee, and all.

And so it was that the now affluent Japanese, developed a taste for 'le vie en rose'. But another development happened at the beginning of the '90s just as the cafe boom was getting underway, which is equally responsible for shaping the present landscape. That ultimate symbol of over-the-top prices, the Tokyo Stock Exchange, peaked at over 3,800 yen and began to fall precipitously. The party, as they say, was over.

Through all my previous description of the astronomical price of a cup of coffee, I intentionally neglected to mention that there was one low-price alternative. Doutour pioneered the cheap-coffee chain, opening its doors for business in 1962. For all that time since, they were the only major player in the coffee chain store market. Now they suddenly had company. It came first from a natural, domestic, rival. In 1988 U.C.C. (Uemura Coffee Company) which invented that most Japanese of inventions, the canned cup of coffee, dispersed from a coin operated machine called a "Jidohanbaiki", teamed up with Suntory to produce a cheap cafe/bar alternative named "Pronto". The cafe/bar was already in existence for quite some time. Since most people prefer to drink liquor after work, and since it was every bit as profitable as coffee, the match was organic and the expertise or licensing required for dispersing either was minimal. The UCC-Suntory affair took advantage of both the newfound taste for cappuccino and the newfound need to economize. The resulting combination was neither quite as European as its name suggests, nor quite as cheap as its coffee-chain predecessor. But it was at the right place at the right time. While Doutor had shown that there was a place for the Horn & Harduct approach in selling coffee in Japan (as indeed MacDonald's and others had done in the food industry) Pronto proved that even people who previously felt cheap was synonymous with bad, could be persuaded to change their opinion given the right combination of convenience and stylish image. In fact, as the general economic conditions worsened, the job of persuading became unnecessary. The general populace has been forced to forgo the more expensive amusements to the extent that sitting in surroundings of a foreign air, with a cappuccino and a pastry, could now pass for an inexpensive form of amusement.

Enter Starbucks, the American coffee company with yuppie flair, flavored coffee and comfy chairs. Though Doutor and Pronto were cheaper and outlets plentiful, Starbucks showed just how much drinking coffee had become a new form of rediscovered Western culture. It also showed categorically that a new market for 'upscale cheap chic' was now solidly entrenched. Not that coffee had returned to the prices of yore, but a progressive increase from the 120-130 yen of Doutor and the 200-250 yen Pronto continued with Starbucks pushing it to 350-380 yen. Then too another innovation of the past 20 years, the 5% sales tax, helped push the price higher. It also become clear that the "European style" cafe - whether open or not - married to the "American style" fast-food chain, is here to stay. In the wake of Starbucks success (in no small part due to the expertise of their Japanese partner Sazaby), a wave of 'me too' shops have inundated the already saturated market. Doutor, as an apt example of that oriental motto "never hesitate to copy success, literally", came up with a new chain called Excelsior and was promptly sued by Starbucks for copying success a bit too closely. But there is no way to stem the tide once the floodgates open. Even that staid old workhorse of Euro/Japanese pastry, Morozoff, has begun converting its former brand of "German Style" cafe to the Starbucks model of self-service chic.

For the future its difficult to say 'more of the same' but equally difficult to say otherwise. Arguably, the cafe of the European type is still the model and indeed continues to flourish even where the price is high. The coffee, the style, the very air if you will, favors it. So does the newfound leisurely attitude of the young and continuing addiction to things foreign. Economics however, continues to favor the American, fast food, and self-service model, honed to a state of subliminal attachment as powerful as any Pavlovian training could ever provide. After all, where else can you find young Japanese more or less cleaning up after themselves and paying for the privilege? Another factor favoring this model has been the economics of scale, which has forced more and more mom-and-pop shops to become a franchise of the majors' or disappear from the map.

On the other side of the equation is the inevitable reaction to too much of a good thing. This may pertain more to the chain-store approach than the cafe itself. A case in point is the anti-fast food movement called "slow food", founded in 1986 in Italy and lead by Carlo Petrini. The problem, I believe, is not between fast and slow however but in whether or not it can be packaged. Because, like it or not, convenience is in our day and age one of the Seven (or Eight) Deadly Sins. One economic factor that may favor the non-franchise option, has been the drop in land prices, rent and the general costs of doing business in metropolitan areas such as Tokyo. The result of this has been a resurgence of funky little homemade type eateries-cafe's included. These places are usually little more than a few good coffees, small but interesting menu, ambitious young owners and lots of atmosphere. Their merit may be in being 'up close and personal' in the increasingly impersonal world of part-timers serving up food and drink from a faceless mega-national. The poor economy has helped this trend in another important if traumatic way. With so many people thrown out of work in their 40's and 50's, and with the prospects of entry and reentry into the workforce dwindling, many people have been forced to use their savings and their wits to create their own employment. A lot of these people have gone into the food industry. Hopefully this trend will last even as the economy turns around and will serve to keep the cafe offerings both deep and diverse.

Of course, coffee will always be coffee. But out there in the Japanese countryside where population is sparse and trends take longer to develop - if they ever do at all - the "People" are waiting with bated breath and empty cups for a Starbucks or Sega Fredo Zanetti to open up in their town. And who knows, if somewhere out there, some young buck with a yen for culture is sipping a mezzo mezzo and dreaming, even now, of writing the final chapter in the saga of the Kissaten and the cafe.