Starfish & Coffee

I have been awash in insincerity and a lack of genuineness. I recently went into my first Starbucks whose proliferation in Japan while not yet reaching the state of development in the States where people with short-term memory loss caused by recent head trauma unable to remember that they just exited a Starbucks will stroll to a Starbucks directly across the street from the one they just exited to fill their days constantly drinking Latte Grandes. Still Starbucks are popping up around Nagoya like slugs in the garden after the rain.

Now I love coffee. When I wake up the first thing I do is pour myself a cup of the lukewarm leavings from the carafe of the previous day’s coffee. I like the slightly warm or even stone cold coffee first thing in the morning. No sitting around blowing steam over the cup for me. I need that caffeine to hit my neuron gaps as soon as possible. I can slam down two or three of these cool cups so that I can start my day. After Shizuko gets up, she will usually make a pot of fresh coffee. I will usually take a half a cup for a café o let with my breakfast. And then after dinner, I like a cup of coffee with lots of cream and sugar – something sweet after the meal.

How can someone so in love with coffee never have been to a Starbucks? Basically I have contempt for coffee snobs – people who need their café mocha Kilimanjaro roast with hazelnut cream. They don’t love coffee. You can’t love coffee if you will drink it only one way. If you love it, you would never pour the cold coffee down the sink. If you love it, you drink coffee cold, black, with cream, with sugar. The love of coffee knows no arbitrary boundaries. Love without borders or limits is how I explain my feeling for coffee.

Still I digress. The Starbucks I went into in Nagoya was nice, clean, well lit with several comfortable chairs and some soft jazz playing in the background. The building where the Starbucks was located was a modern concrete and glass affair, but the Starbucks was modeled as though it had been part of a renovated warehouse. The walls were faux brick. There were classic Jazz posters for Charlie Parker and Dave Brubeck on the walls. Small piles of books like the Catcher in the Rye were artfully collecting dust on shelves. I imagined it looked like any Starbucks anywhere in the world. The overstuffed chairs were comfortable and the coffee was good, but there was an inauthenticity about the place. It would have been fine in Seattle, but it was not of Nagoya. It was a simulation of something organic to another place and time. The decorations were props in a staging of the play The Coffeehouse.

In this respect, McDonald’s is more sincere. It is a fast food restaurant. Each McDonald’s is an archetype of its garish plastic form. McDonald’s does not pretend to be fine dining. It is fast food. Starbucks struck me as a fast food restaurant in denial of its true character.

Probably what made me so critical of Starbucks was a trip over the long weekend to a place called Italian Village. Basically it is a shopping mall filled with Italian brands and products. It is located at the Nagoya port and the outdoor mall is designed like a travel brochure for Italy. The roofs are all orange Italian stucco and the streets are cobblestone. There is a full-size model of Michelangelo’s David, canals with gondolas and even a copy of Giotti’s Bell Tower from Florence. An Italy designed for day tripping tourists. Italy without the Ethiopian prostitutes or beaches covered with hypodermic needles. What a great idea.

The Italian Village was crowded with tourists from Singapore or Taiwan all speaking Chinese. Chinese tourists in Japan visiting an Italian shopping mall theme park. Is that what globalization means? A world where we can get our coffee with a side of Seattle Jazz scene circa 1962 and eat our pizza watching the gondolas float past and still be home by dinner.