Coffee Journal of Consumer Culture

Since their entry to Japan in the latter half of the 19th century, coffee and coffee shops have been closely linked to the economic, political, and socio-cultural change undergone by the Japanese society. The cafe´s themselves have gone through numerous transformations in order to address the various social needs of their patrons. Today, coffee shops occupy a significant niche in the Japanese urban lifestyle. However, the cultural ‘baggage’ of coffee as a foreign commodity still plays a central role in generating its consumer appeal. Coffee is a global commodity whose value on the world market is surpassed only by oil. Moreover, due to its peculiar historical background, it became a beverage charged with a wide range of cultural meanings; tracing these meanings in different contexts can shed light on the way cultural commodities ‘behave’ in the globalized world. In order to examine the niche that coffee occupies in the Japanese consumption scene, I will analyze the manner in which representations of coffee are constructed and translated into a consumer experience. Through the case of coffee in Japan I will try to demonstrate the process of ‘movement of culture’, whereby the relevance of a foreign commodity in the local context is determined by the complex interplay between two culturally engineered binary entities of ‘global’ and ‘local’, ‘foreign’ and ‘native’.

 

Chilly December evening in the city of Kyoto; automatic glass doors of one of the city’s trendy shopping malls lead to a marble-paved lobby with a small Starbucks in it. An outer glass wall overlooks the back yard where, just a few meters
away from the mall, stands an ancient temple of Rokkakudo – one of the oldest
Buddhist temples in Kyoto. 

Seen through the transparent glass, the temple, with its
noble contours and dark brown color, appears to occupy the inner space of the
mall. Armchairs serving the Starbucks store are lined along the glass wall, facing
the outside, as if turning the transparent wall and the temple behind it into a huge
screen. Quiet Irish-sounding Christmas-themed music is played in the background.
Between the glass and the temple, there is a small garden patch with several Tanuki
statues hiding in the grass.1
In the center, a Christmas installation is erected – a
white carriage pulled by a white horse, both made of illuminated wires; by its side
an illuminated Santa climbs an illuminated tree trunk. The brightly lit marble hall,
the gleaming horse and the dark mass of the temple in the background create a
rather surreal landscape. Visually, the temple is turned into an exhibited artifact;
however, it is a functioning temple, to some extent more real than the blinking
Christmas images. The temple and the mall seem to represent two polarities of the
Japanese cultural construction – the old tradition, on the one hand, and the incorporation of new (often foreign, mostly western) trends, on the other. Gazing on this
scene, we can lament the loss of elegance and spirituality of the old times to the
imported images of globalized consumption; or we can try to comprehend the new
reality embracing both aspects as two interconnected elements responsible for forging new tastes, lifestyles and identities.
What place does Starbucks, a globalized American chain notorious for its ubiquity and aggressive expansion, occupy in this mixed landscape? What is the nature
of its interplay with the temple, the very epitome of ‘Japaneseness’? What kind of
consumer experience do global coffee chains construct in Japan, and how does it
correspond with the cultural ‘baggage’ of coffee? This essay attempts to answer
these questions by offering a perspective on the role of foreign products in contemporary Japanese consumption, and on the way various ‘cultural odors’
(Iwabuchi, 2002) are exploited to generate consumer appeal. Following
Iwabuchi’s conceptualization, the term ‘odor’ is used here to denote ‘the way in
which cultural features of a country of origin and images or ideas of its national, in
most cases stereotyped, way of life are associated positively with a particular product in the consumption process’ (Iwabuchi, 2002: 27). Through the story of coffee
in Japan, this study aims to inform the debate on globalization and incorporation
of global commodities in local contexts.