Explore everyday life in Japan
Often, when we hear that somebody has been somewhere we have never been or that someone has done something we have never done, we want to know what it was like; so we ask questions: How was it? What did you think? Would you do it again? Etc.
Since coming to Japan nine years ago, one of the most common questions I have received from people both in Japan and abroad is, What shocked you when you first came to Japan? People love to ask me variations on this question. And I, in turn, love to ask other people variations of this question when I hear about their travels and experiences. It’s an interesting question, one that sometimes produces really surprising answers.
When it comes to me and my experiences with transitioning to life in Japan, however, that is not the case.
The one thing that really turned my world upside down when I first came to Japan was the fact that I couldn’t just walk out the door of my apartment and get a cheap cup of coffee from any street corner that I wanted. The year was 2009, and there I was, in the middle of a city with a population of 800,000 people, surrounded by convenience stores, kisatens, supermarkets, and restaurants, and nowhere, absolutely nowhere, could I get a cheap cup of takeout coffee to bring to the park with me or enjoy as I walked down the street. It blew me away.
Where I came from in the United States, you could quickly and easily buy a cup of coffee for little more or less than a dollar at any gas station, convenience store, or supermarket you came by. Every one of them had hot, steaming pots of the stuff waiting and on the ready.
When I first came to Japan, though, there was nothing like this. There weren’t coffee pots in the convenience stores. There weren’t diners that served bottomless cups of coffee for a dollar or two. There were only vending machines, vending machines that served warmed cans of coffee (which I found undrinkable). And there were warming shelves in convenience stores too, which held more cans of warm coffee. That was it.
Of course, if you wanted to get a good cup of coffee (and pay the price for it) there were plenty of coffee shops, both new and old, all over the city, but they often required finding, and in many cases they didn’t have paper cups, so unless you carried your own mug or thermos around with you, you couldn’t get a cup of coffee to go even if you wanted to.
Now, fast forward nine years to today and you can find single brew coffee machines on just about every street corner in Japan, coffee machines which sell both hot coffee and iced coffee for less than two dollars.
If I were to come to Japan today for the first time, I wonder what would surprise and shock me. Maybe it would be all of these bean grinding coffee machines.
For those of you have been to Japan before, what surprised and/or shocked you?
This is an ongoing series that will explore various aspects of daily life in Japan. My hope is that this series will not only reveal to its followers, image by image, what Japan looks like, but that it will also inform its followers about unique Japanese items and various cultural and societal practices. If you are interested in getting regular updates about life in Japan, please consider following me at 