Helena Grinshpun - Global Coffee and Cultural Change in Modern Japan

This book explores the impact in Japan of the rise of global coffee chains and the associated coffee culture. Based on extensive original research, the book discusses the cultural context of Japan, where tea-drinking has been culturally important, reports on the emergence of the new coffee shop consumer experience, and reflects on the link between consumption and identity, on cultural fantasies about modern, Western, or global lifestyles, on the effects of global standardization, and on much more.

Helena Grinshpun is a Lecturer in the Department of Asian Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Series editor:

Joy Hendry, Oxford Brookes University

Editorial Board:

Pamela Asquith, University of Alberta

Eyal Ben Ari, Kinneret Academic College, Sea of Galilee

Christoph Brumann, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Munich

Henry Johnson, Otago University

Hirochika Nakamaki, the Suita City Museum

Founder Member of the Editorial Board:

Jan van Bremen, University of Leiden

The First European Description of Japan, 1585

A Critical English-Language Edition of Striking Contrasts in the Customs of Europe and Japan by Luis Frois, S.J.

Translated, edited and annotated by Richard K. Danford, Robin D. Gill, and Daniel T. Reff

The Japanese Family

Touch, Intimacy and Feeling

Diana Tahhan

Happiness and the Good Life in Japan

Edited by Wolfram Manzenreiter and Barbara Holthus

Religion in Japanese Daily Life

David C. Lewis

Escaping Japan

Reflections on Estrangement and Exile in the Twenty-First Century

Edited by Blai Guarn and Paul Hansen

Women Managers in Neoliberal Japan

Gender, Precarious Labour and Everyday Lives

Swee-Lin Ho

Global Coffee and Cultural Change in Modern Japan

Helena Grinshpun

For a full list of available titles please visit: www.routledge.com/Japan-Anthropology-Workshop-Series/book-series/SE0627

Helena Grinshpun

First published 2021

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge

52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2021 Helena Grinshpun

The right of Helena Grinshpun to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book has been requested

ISBN: 978-0-367-53392-2 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-003-08177-7 (ebk)

What is taste? At its most basic, taste refers to the physiological senses involved in ingesting drink and food. More widely, it refers to peoples liking (or disliking) a certain flavor. However, as social scientists have shown, taste involves the interactions between an embodied set of sensations, a culturally constructed set of valuations and skills, embeddedness in social structures, and globally travelling images and products. With these points in mind, Helena Grinshpuns wonderful ethnography approaches taste through the processes involved in the importation of Starbucks Coffee into Japan. Her analysis, in the best anthropological tradition, presents an empirically based contention that only a wholistic, multidimensional approach can encompass the issues involved in these processes. Moreover, deciding to focus on coffee makes eminent sense, not only because of its contemporary ubiquity but since, on the face of it, the importation of coffee into Japan seems have to encountered its long tradition drinking tea. The emergence of a coffee culture in Japan is hence a wonderful site through which to explore the question of the emergence of new tastes against the background of a sophisticated culinary culture.

I first met Helena when she was already a very promising student in one of my classes in Israel. We met again when she began her PhD studies at Kyoto University and was debating about what to devote her thesis to. This book is the outcome of her thesis but represents a much more developed and sophisticated form of that text. Indeed, the fieldwork on which this book is based spans two additional stints of extended fieldwork after her PhD studies and spans the period between 2005 and 2017. Over the years, I have met Helena numerous times to discuss her fascinating research projects and have had the personal pleasure of accompanying her during parts of her academic career.

As I see it, the wider import of this book lies in dealing with two main set of issues. First, as scholars have long noted, drink and food are central to a variety of moral, social, and aesthetic meanings and signify and actualize notions of proper comportment and sociality. Take the idea of a (culturally accepted and valued) proper drink, one that is prepared according to unwritten culinary and behavioral rules and consumed in a structured drinking event with or without appropriate participants. This kind of appropriateness differs across cultures and refers not only to the formal drinking in the tea ceremony or wine in some Jewish rituals. It also entails more but also the everyday, often but not only family or work-centered events, of the preparation and consumption of drinks.

What Helenas book reveals so skillfully is that such drinking events in which concocting and drinking coffee (even on the go) cannot be understood apart from much wider social and cultural dynamics. Along these lines, Helena is not content simply with charting out the place of coffee in Japan today but argues that anthropological understandings of such drinks are embedded in the wider, even global systems of production, dissemination, and consumption and are propagated by key social actors. In her analysis of Starbucks Coffee, Helena fascinatingly shows how drink-times and drink-spaces are localized versions of global images. Expertly linking her work to analyses of consumption, moreover, she offers a framework for analyzing how globalized brands are localized in appropriate settings that produce and reproduce sought-after tastes. Hence, for individuals the simple act of drinking Starbucks Coffee is a way to learn and replicate drinking as members of social and cultural groups marked generationally and by an urban milieu.