Coffee

 I've been a coffee addict for forty years or more. I've liked it for a very long time. My family were all coffee drinkers.

When I came to Japan I was pleasantly surprised by the cafes. There were small, dark, smoke-filled rooms all wood grain and velvet cushions. The coffee was good, and the food was what it was, nothing fancy.

The menu offered a variety of hot and cold coffee drinks as well as soft drinks and alcohol. It also had sandwiches, pasta, curry and a variety of cake.

A customer could sit and read the variety of magazines, newspapers, manga, or novels that the cafes always had on offer. No one was going to chase you out, because, for one reason, servers do not work for tips.

In the Nagoya area a majority of the working population eats their breakfast at cafes. "Morning," as it is known, is a meal offered before lunch. It includes various things, but mostly some combination of ham, eggs, bread, and a veggie salad, plus a cup of coffee. 

I think most of the people who frequent cafes in the afternoons are businessmen who need a quick meal and a cup of coffee, or retired people who want a place to meet their friends.

Recently franchise operations, like Tully's, Doutor, and Komeda have made serious dents in those old Showa period cafes. They offer a number of differences to the older types, standardized and recognized coffee and other drinks. They offer some food, but none of it  as good as the old cafes.

Convenience stores have also begun to offer a variety of good coffee drinks for a very low price. A small cup of coffee costs around a dollar, where the same size cup of coffee might cost three to four dollars at a cafe. Customers can buy goods or services there, and have a good cup of coffee, a latte, or an number of other hot or cold coffee drinks for a reasonable price. 

If you like to make your own coffee, you are covered, too. You can buy coffee beans of different varieties, roasted to your specifications in many places. I live in a relatively rural community, and I can get a bag of freshly roasted coffee beans at a cafe just ten minutes away from my house. If I wanted to have a larger selection, I could go to the nearest department store and buy a bag of beans from their large selection of freshly roasted coffee. 

At home we drink Peace Coffee from Peace Winds Japan (PWJ). PWJ is an NGO that helps people around the world. One of their projects is coffee production in East Timor. They have helped the people there to establish their own coffee growing operations that supply coffee to people all over the world. 

It appears that more people drink tea than coffee here. That means that there we really have the best of both worlds here, high quality tea as well as coffee.