Coffee Life in Japan: Volume 36 (California Studies in Food and Culture) - Softcover

"Required reading for coffee's true believers and industry insiders." -- Oliver Strand T: The New York Times Style Magazine "You'll find your eyes opened beyond the new and storied cafes you've heard of and into regional corners and paradoxical tastes." Serious Eats "A fascinating 130-year illumination of Japan's deeply rooted sipping culture." LA Weekly "This excellent book combines academic rigour with lively descriptions and compelling prose." Times Higher Education "Provides an engaging and often personal account of Japanese coffeehouses... Highly recommended." -- R. R. Wilk, Indiana University Choice "Merry White has whiled away many hours in cafes in Japan in her professional role as an anthropologist, and wishes to communicate the diversity and intimacy one can experience in them." Times Literary Supplement (TLS) "Perhaps this isn't really a review, more a recommendation - all I can really say is that I enjoyed it, and ... you'll probably enjoy this too." Jimseven "This book will certainly give you ... a lot of new knowledge and maybe a whole new perspective on Japanese culture." Yum "Coffee Life in Japan provides a novel and significant study on contemporary Japanese life." -- Willa Zhen, Culinary Institute of America Journal Of American-East Asian Relations

This fascinating book - part ethnography, part memoir - traces Japan's vibrant cafe society over one hundred and thirty years. Merry White traces Japan's 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. White's 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 cafe 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.