num_pages: 240
description: 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.
language: English
title: Coffee Life in Japan
publisher: University of California Press