Cafés in Japan from Sapporo to Fukuoka

From Dutch Nagasaki to the Ginza café

Coffee reached Japan with Dutch traders calling at Nagasaki; the writer Ōta Nanpo recorded being served it aboard a Dutch ship in 1804–05.⁵ In the port of Kobe, Hōkōdō (放香堂), a Motomachi merchant dealing mainly in Uji tea, began selling coffee in 1878, and that December it advertised in the Yomiuri Shimbun, offering it to drink in the shop or ground to take away.⁶ Kahiichakan (可否茶館), usually counted as the first coffee house proper, opened in Tokyo's Ueno district in 1888 as a cultural salon and closed soon after.⁵

Coffee went public in 1911. Café Printemps opened in March and Café Lion in August, and in December Mizuno Ryū, known for organizing Japanese emigration to Brazil, opened Café Paulista in Ginza with beans the São Paulo state government gave him free. A coffee and a doughnut cost 5 sen each.⁷

Demand stalled from about 1935 as war approached, and import controls outlasted the war. Green coffee was freed for import only in 1960, and instant coffee in 1961.⁵

Kissaten and jun-kissa

The kissaten (喫茶店, a tea-and-coffee house) spread after the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake, often in rented, rebuilt storefronts. Tokyo's city yearbook counted 55 right after the quake and 671 by 1928.⁸

Owners who wanted distance from the cafés of the day, known for waitress service and alcohol, called theirs jun-kissa (純喫茶, "pure kissa"). The Brasileiro chain advertised that it had dropped alcohol entirely.⁸ Nationwide, kissaten peaked at 154,630 in 1981; by 2021 there were 58,669.⁹

Cans, konbini cups and regular coffee

A large share of Japan's coffee comes in a can. UCC's Coffee with Milk, launched in 1969, was the first commercially successful canned coffee, and from 1973 Pokka sold cans through vending machines that dispensed them hot or cold.¹⁰ In 2017 the country had roughly one vending machine for every 23 people.¹⁰

The konbini (コンビニ, convenience store) joined in January 2013, when Seven-Eleven began selling Seven Café cups from self-serve machines. It sold 450 million cups in the first year and passed 1.1 billion in fiscal 2018.¹¹ Between fiscal 2012 and 2018, regular (brewed, not instant) coffee rose from 3.2 to 3.69 cups per person per week.¹¹

Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, Kobe, Sapporo, Fukuoka and Nagoya

Tokyo is where the Japanese coffee house began, and where its newest chapter opened. Blue Bottle chose Kiyosumi, an older part of the city, for its first shop outside the United States in February 2015. Its founder, James Freeman, cited the old kissaten, small dim rooms with a barista behind a wooden counter, as his inspiration.¹²

Kyoto keeps its prewar rooms. François opened in 1934 near Shijō as a meikyoku kissa (名曲喫茶, a café for classical records), and in 2003 it was registered as a national Tangible Cultural Property.¹³ Inoda Coffee still brews by nel drip, through flannel, as it has since it opened, and has served its coffee with milk and sugar already added since its early days.¹⁴

Osaka had Café Paulista's first branch, in Minō, opened in June 1911, six months before Ginza, though it soon closed. The Dōtonbori branch followed in January 1912.⁷ Osaka and western Japan ordered iced coffee as reikō (冷コー), short for "cold coffee". The word has mostly faded, but in 2025 a café near Tsūtenkaku still advertised it on a poster by the door.¹⁵

Kobe keeps its kissaten close to its bakeries. Nishimura Coffee opened in 1948 as a three-table shop on Hunter Slope (ハンター坂) in Kitano and in 1974 opened what it calls Japan's first members-only kissaten; it brews its blend with Miyamizu, the Nada sake district's spring water.¹⁶ The city's first bakeries, run by British and French owners, opened in the foreign settlement in 1869, and in 2023–2025 Kobe households outspent every other prefectural capital and major city on bread, at ¥41,967 a year.¹⁷

Sapporo roasts dark. Its kissaten began roasting their own beans in the 1970s, and the style they set was fukairi (深煎り, a deep roast); many of those early shops still trade, which Gotō Eijirō of Marumi Coffee, writing for the city's tourism site, calls rare for Japan.¹⁸ In the 2020 household survey Sapporo households spent more on coffee than those of any other major city, ¥8,691 a year against a national ¥6,988.¹⁸

Fukuoka's specialty bars gather near Yakuin subway station, which The Way to Coffee calls the city's coffee hub, although the general public still leans toward dark roasts.¹⁹ Manu Coffee is counted among the first of that wave, Coffee County opened in 2016 after its owner spent time on Nicaraguan coffee farms, and Iwase Yoshikazu, a Fukuoka barista, won the Japan Barista Championship in 2015.¹⁹

Nagoya is known for what arrives with the cup. Mōningu (モーニング, the morning service), toast or an egg served at no charge with a morning drink, is famous in the Nagoya region for portions and extras well beyond other parts of Japan. Its birthplace is disputed: one account puts it around 1950 in Ichinomiya, an Aichi textile town, where cafés added peanuts or a boiled egg for traders meeting early, and Toyohashi and Hiroshima have claims of their own.²⁰

The habit shows in the household survey. In 2023–2025, Nagoya households of two or more averaged ¥16,431 a year in coffee-shop bills, top among prefectural capitals and major cities and about 60% above the national ¥10,261.²¹