In downtown Tokyo, there are plenty of Starbucks, Cafe Veloce, Tully's and other such cafes. They mostly all look the same, (like someone's sitting room) all serve one kind of "blend" coffee and a slew of latte, cappuccino, and sweet drinks with very little actual coffee in them. They also contain lots and lots of people on a Saturday afternoon. It seems these are good places for people to study or read for hours on end. Okay, no real surprise there. But what about for people who want to sit down and drink a cup of coffee?
After looking into 3 or 4 of the type of shops I just described, I noticed a sign with the kanji for coffee. I suddenly realized that I had been looking in the wrong place if I wanted a cup of coffee. For coffee, you need to go to a "coffee shop" not a "cafe".
Usually, the word coffee will be written in english, or a simplified script for foreign words (called katakana). Those shops have basically become private, bring-your-own-book libraries. For coffee, you look for the word written in kanji. A few words, like tobacco and coffee, were somehow matched with kanji characters at some point.
The kanji for tobacco (煙草) actually makes plenty of sense. The two characters actually mean, "smoke" and "grass", which is close enough to what tobacco (or wacky tabacky) is, so someone did a good job of picking out those characters.
The two kanji used for Coffee on the other hand (珈琲) were an odd selection! The first character means "an ornamental hairpin" and the second one means "a string of many pearls". WHAT!?
According to my personal Chinese adviser, these characters were chosen because their pronunciation is close to "coffee" (actually, closer to "cafe") and because they are rarely used for anything else. In fact, those characters are only seen when used together and to mean coffee.
Well, to be able to recognize those two characters suddenly opened up a whole new world. Within 3 minutes we were seated in a shop that looked slightly like a lounge with velor chairs, wooden tables, and chandelier lighting. There was a bar on one side where they made different blends of coffee with a siphon (basically a flame under a glass contraption). We were given menus to order from at our seat by a girl wearing a classy black and white uniform. I ordered a Brazilian coffee with a piece of pound cake for about $6.00. When the coffee was served to our table, it was served in beautiful ceramic cups with gold etching on them and around the edge of the saucers, NOT in a coffee mug I might have at home or a 12 oz paper cup. The sugar was served in a small glass pot on our table and a little metal cup of cream, NOT disposable sugar packets or plastic creamers you would expect to get from a fast food drive through.
And thus, we enjoyed our afternoon coffee break before hitting the busy streets of Tokyo once again to finish our errands. Now I have realized this little difference between "coffee with kanji" and part-time baristas, so hopefully I will never have to exhaust myself looking for a cup of coffee again. That little experience opened my eyes in more ways than one.
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