One of the things I read about while getting ready for our vacation in Japan were these famous tiny businesses: bars or izakayas with four seats, narrow little bookstores or record shops in people’s houses or the bottom floors of small buildings, hyper-specialized or themed bars owned by one passionate guy. (There’s one that’s chock-full of Star Wars memorabilia, for example.)
We got to visit a couple of such places, and saw many more from the street. I’m planning to write a longer, more thematic piece on all of this, on the vibrant business and street culture in Japanese cities and the seemingly very, very low barriers to entry for regular people to participate. Today I’m showing you one of these businesses.
In Kyoto, before an afternoon of doing tourist stuff, we wanted to get a cup of coffee at a local coffee shop. Luckily it was after 10am, when many coffee shops open—coffee is common in Japan, but it doesn’t seem to be a grab-one-on-the-way-to-work thing. There are a lot of lovely, leisurely cafes that at least try to lean into the craft of coffee, though of course the quality can be uneven (we had no bad coffee, but one or two were really good).
I simply searched “coffee” on Google Maps, and this one place popped up a few blocks away. I knew from the photo of the building that this was the one I wanted to try.
This is the shop. I am standing on the street here:
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And in the driveway here:
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It isn’t quite as tiny as it looks, because it extends left between the buildings in front and back of it. This is the little corridor behind it:
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This is literally a small shack in someone’s driveway, between the street and their house, which serves as a little one-man business. In the daytime, obviously, it’s a coffee shop. In the evening, however, it becomes a bar, with some basic beer and whisky offerings. (It’s much easier to sell alcohol in Japan than in America.)
We ordered two different beans/roasts, from a little detailed menu of different offerings. The owner/barista measured and ground our beans to order, and while he made our pour-overs (pour-over appears to be more common in Japanese cafes than espresso) I observed the very old coffee grinder, just for display, which if I remember correctly had a nameplate for a predecessor company to Panasonic.
There wasn’t a lot of space inside, maybe enough to fit 12 people max, but it felt spacious.
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Note that vintage amplifier, which I assume was somehow connected to the beautiful old Denon turntable in the corner, playing a jazz record.
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I’m not sure why it is that this obviously aging little structure doesn’t feel ugly or rundown. It doesn’t trigger any negative feelings. It somehow feels atmospheric, like a living time capsule.
The music, of course, helped.
I know those are modern, probably LED lightbulbs, but their color, almost like some old flickering film come to life, really does things for a plain space.
It’s such a curious, almost uncanny, feeling to enter one of these places. The inside feels much bigger and grander than the outside. It almost feels like entering a portal to another world or another time. Now that I think about it, there was nothing in this shop that would tell you it isn’t still, say, 1960.
The closest thing I can think of is entering one of those grand old urban churches, where the door creaks closed behind you and the interior blocks out the city noise, and it’s just you and the silence, and maybe God is in the silence.
I suppose, religion aside, that that feeling is wonder. That is not a feeling I often feel running errands and going out in America. But it’s a feeling that the Japanese business landscape and built environment is able to spark frequently.
Maybe it’s that on vacation your work/routine brain is off, and you’re more receptive to the curiosity and delight out there. Maybe that delight is everywhere. I try to think so, and I’ve written pieces making just that argument. But I think there’s really something substantively different about commerce at this tiny, almost intimate scale. It blurs the line between business/customer and host/guest: in a way you really are a guest in this man’s space. There’s a social element that is lost when it all gets too big. And when it’s oriented around cars, too. There’s a seamlessness, a frictionlessness, to visiting tiny shops in walkable cities.
It’s subtle, but it isn’t metaphysical or magical. It’s about giving people permission to pursue a passion or hobby at a slightly commercialized scale, rather than forcing them to either keep it to themselves or take the big, risky, expensive jump of going into business. This is genuine free enterprise: barriers so low that almost anyone can try something out without running into the brick wall of regulatory obstruction. This is how freedom can grow the small, the local, the beautiful.
And the coffee was pretty good, too.
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