On Change.

Two things I started doing in Japan that surprised me were drinking coffee and listening to NPR. These surprised me for the following reasons: a) I don't like coffee, b) Japan is one of the tea-drinking capitals of the world, and c) you can't even listen to NPR on Japanese radios. And if you could, I don't think anyone would. I had to listen via podcast.

Why did I start drinking coffee? I don't know. Well - I could hazard some sort of relation between my coffee drinking and my host mother's constant fussing over my social hot drink preferences. And aggravated by her predilection for coffee shops. Did you know that Japan is crawling with coffee shops? It is.

I will describe to you a Japanese coffee shop. One: it is owned and operated by a very old, slightly deaf couple. Two: the furniture is creaky. Three: the coffee is served in teacups and Four: the teacups are very small. One cup of coffee will cost you six or seven dollars. There are no refills. The creamer comes in tiny white plastic thimbles. The drapes are red and almost - but not quite - made of velvet.

(This is all assuming you have not stumbled upon a Japanese Starbucks, Doutor, Cafe La France, or Komeda's Coffee. These are all chains, and thus very different from what I am describing. For the purposes of this story, you have not stumbled upon a Japanese Starbucks, Doutor, Cafe La France, or Komeda's Coffee.)

So I am sitting in a dusty little coffee shop with my host mother and she says: what would you like? And I say: tea. Except I use the wrong word for tea; I say: o-cha. And a stab of panic floods her eyes. O-cha is Japanese tea and a coffee shop is a foreign institution, artificially installed and widely embraced by the Japanese, but crucially not Japanese, and therefore I may not drink o-cha but there is no polite way for her to tell me that I am being horribly gauche and so instead she smiles painfully and says: don't you want ko-cha? and I look up ko-cha on my handy little pocket-sized electronic dictionary and it means:

tea.

But aha! - it means black tea, as foreign as I am and more importantly, they serve it at this foreign coffee shop run by a Japanese couple who may never have left this island. So I say: yes, please, and we breathe easy for a while.

But only a little while.

Why did I start drinking coffee? Because the thought of drinking tea became so emotionally exhausting that it defeated my purpose in drinking it: namely, to relax. The thought of cha - o or ko made me anxious, because no sooner would I order it than someone would ask me: milk or lemon? and there is no way out of that; it doesn't matter whether or not you want milk or lemon; you must choose. Milk or lemon? Ice or hot? Cake or death? And did you pronounce your tea's name correctly? And are you drinking it with the proper deference for your elders?

You get the point. So I started drinking coffee.

NPR, now, NPR has nothing whatsoever to do with coffee shops. In fact, it has nothing to do with Japan or Japanese institutions or language barriers or personal tastes. One day my fellow American Natalie introduced me to the weekly news quiz "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me!" and it made for good listening on the train.