Coffee life in Japan / Merry White.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

White, Merry I., 1941-

Series:

California studies in food and culture ; 36.

California studies in food and culture ; 36

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Coffee--Social aspects--Japan.

Coffee.

Coffeehouses--Social aspects--Jpaan.

Coffeehouses.

Popular culture--Japan.

Popular culture.

Japan--Social life and customs.

Japan.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (238 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Berkeley : University of California Press, c2012.

Summary:

This fascinating book-part ethnography, part memoir-traces Japan's vibrant café 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 café 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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Illustrations

Preface

Chapter 1. Coffee in Public: Cafés in Urban Japan

Chapter 2. Japan's Cafés: Coffee and the Counterintuitive

Chapter 3. Modernity and the Passion Factory

Chapter 4. Masters of Their Universes: Performing Perfection

Chapter 5. Japan's Liquid Power

Chapter 6. Making Coffee Japanese: Taste in the Contemporary Café

Chapter 7. Urban Public Culture: Webs, Grids, and Third Places in Japanese Cities

Chapter 8. Knowing Your Place

Appendix: Visits to Cafés, an Unreliable Guide

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Index

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 24. Apr 2020)

ISBN:

9786613521101

9781280116810

1280116811

9780520952485

0520952480

OCLC:

780425994