CULTURE: Cafes and "Kissaten" (喫茶店) Japanese traditional cafes, other small restaurants

 Up the street from my apartment is a chain restaurant, "Coco's Curry House," serving curry in a variety of dishes. A restaurant based on Japanese-style curry should be unmatched in competition... but it's not. While Coco's gives you options in your spice levels (and it does get pretty spicy in the level 5-10 range, a 7 making me sweat and strangely giving me violent and terrifying nightmares the night after), it for sure does not boast the best-tasting curry. I guess it's all a matter of personal preference, but you can go to any Coco's in the country and it'll essentially taste the same. You can go to McDonald's and get a cup of coffee and it'll still taste like shit anywhere you go. The same with the donut chain "Mister Donut", although it'll taste less shitty than the McDonald's. Starbucks? You really want to support the Seattle empire that brings the pomp and arrogance of the Northwest all over the world? That's my job. Tully's has made its presence as well, and I will say it's the coffee chain I enjoy the most anywhere, but I can't be bothered to go there in Japan. This is because, all over Japan, there are "Kissaten", which are traditional Japanese coffee shops that give off an immediate post-war Japan vibe (the largely senior customer-base adds more to the sentiment) as well as other cafes that usually offer distinct and flavorful coffee and food, particularly curry rice, which ties into what I said about Coco's. It's of course a bit pricier, but if you factor in a curry meal at Coco's which end up around ten US dollars, you can get a set meal at a Kissaten for around the same which includes curry or whatever dish you order, salad and coffee. Coco's doesn't look so cheap after factoring what you get, and I never had gruesome nightmares after a Kissaten trip. Every place offers a variety of flavors, that sadly, a lot of Japanese miss out on.

 It's the same deal in the States, I suppose. Big businesses swallow small, individualized ones even more than here in Japan; the amount of small Kissaten, cafes, and restaurants is surprising. This is partly due to loyal customers of these places- as I said, especially in Kissatens, it's a regular old folks' home. In these cases it isn't always exactly stylish to go to these places. If you find Japanese "hipsters", they will know the local spots- a friend at school who left the Folk Song Club to pursue experimental and psychedelic music took me and another student to a Kissaten by the train station. Most Japanese, however, will flock to the McDonald's or Mister Donuts, or at worst, live a convenience store diet. It's certainly cheaper, and there are occasions where I opt for the chains or the convenience stores over the smaller places. But when I have the time and the feeling I will go to smaller places. You can meet people with a lot of character and find various flavors in what they have to serve that you can't find anywhere else. One cafe I went to served incredible coffee, with a flavor and aroma that was unmatched to anything I'd had in Japan before. There's a small Okonomiyaki (Japanese pancake-like food, very famous in the Kobe and Osaka area) restaurant near my apartment, too, run by an old woman with a powerful personality, and the cooking is delicious. While offering different flavors, personalities and atmospheres, sadly, there's hardly any customers in most of these places. Everyone's off at Coco's, McDonald's, Starbucks or Mister Donut.

 This brings me to some conclusion about Westernization in Japan. By becoming more Westernized in terms of chain stores, it actually damages the individualistic aspects of Japanese society. While Western culture supposedly focuses more on the individual, Western models of capitalism turns everyone into the same type of consumer for financial gain. Just like how small businesses comprised a level of American society in the past, larger corporations (particularly in cases like Starbucks and Walmart) move in an offer cheaper goods that eventually wiped those small businesses out, or at least damaged them. Japan has taken steps against this in the past, as I have read in Andrew Gordon's Modern History of Japan, in which the government sectioned off where larger, nation-wide corporations could move into in order to protect smaller, local economies. Japan still retains a good amount of small businesses, to a greater degree than I see in my hometown of Tacoma. These smaller establishments actually emphasize individualism more than what the dominance of large corporations has to offer. It can be argued that Japan's Westernization has long since reached its pique and has settled in its mixture of East and West (meaning that the old fears of the Japanese language becoming more and more diluted into some pidgin-English mixture could be a thing of the past), and that the course of American society is on its own downward spiral. Even through things as simple and as frivolous as visiting different Kissaten, cafes and restaurants, I can form thoughts about the Westernization of Japanese society. Whether the process is continuing or not is something that will be left in the hands of time. Until then I'll be enjoying the different brews of coffee and blends of curry spices.