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Coffee Life in Japan . By Merry White . Berkeley : University of California Press , 2012. 222 pp. $60.00 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).
Book Reviews--Japan
Japan is the land of tea but it is also the land of coffee. This is the surprising revelation of Merry White in her book, Coffee Life in Japan. The beverage's first appearance dates to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when Dutch and Portuguese traders introduced coffee to Japan (pp. 17, 94). In the 1880s, the first coffeehouse in Japan emerged, and coffee rapidly gained popularity after the turn of the twentieth century (p. 93). Japan is now the third largest coffee-importing nation after the United States and Germany (p. 19). White focuses on coffee as a commodity and on the café as the main location for coffee consumption. The book is divided into eight chapters, in which the author combines a social history of coffee in Japan with an ethnographic approach to the café as an urban space, and finally addresses the art of coffee making as connoisseurship. In the appendix, entitled "Visits to Cafés. An Unreliable Guide," the author provides brief descriptions of cafés in Tokyo and Kyoto (pp. 173-77). The book is augmented by a number of photographs of cafés.
One of the strong points of this work is the description of the social function of the café in Japan. In her ethnographic analysis, White--herself a devoted café visitor--describes the café as a...