Coffee Life in Japan [Hardcover]

This fascinating bookpart ethnography, part memoirtraces Japans vibrant caf? society over one hundred and thirty years. Merry White traces Japans coffee craze from the turn of the twentieth century, when Japan helped to launch the Brazilian coffee industry, to the present day, as uniquely Japanese ways with coffee surface in Europe and America. Whites book takes up themes as diverse as gender, privacy, perfectionism, and urbanism. She shows how coffee and coffee spaces have been central to the formation of Japanese notions about the uses of public space, social change, modernity, and pleasure. White describes how the caf? in Japan, from its start in 1888, has been a place to encounter new ideas and experiments in thought, behavior, sexuality , dress, and taste. It is where a person can be socially, artistically, or philosophically engaged or politically vocal. It is also, importantly, an urban oasis, where one can be private in public.

Merry Whiteis Professor of Anthropology at Boston University and is the author of many books, includingPerfectly Japanese: Making Families in an Era of Upheaval(UC Press) andThe Japanese Overseas.

Illustrations
Preface
1. Coffee in Public: Cafe?s in Urban Japan
2. Japans Cafe?s: Coffee and the Counterintuitive
3. Modernity and the Passion Factory
4. Masters of Their Universes: Performing Perfection
5. Japans Liquid Power
6. Making Coffee Japanese: Taste in the Contemporary Cafe?
7. Urban Public Culture: Webs, Grids, and Third Places in Japanese Cities
8. Knowing Your Place
Appendix: Visits to Cafe?s, an Unreliable Guide
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index

Cafes are where change happens and people feel most themselves. In this surprising book we see how Japan came of age in the caf?where women became free, where people jazz and poetry could reign. And, of course, where coffee is at its perfectionisl��