Manga Cafes
Japan Today ran a feature some time back about Manga Kissa, or “Manga Cafes,” which are really more than just manga nowadays!
“Manga kissa” are not new. A style of coffee shop offering a mini-library-sized collection of manga comics available for customers to read on the premises, the first opened in Nagoya in 1979 around the same time that jazz “kissa” were shutting up shop as their once revolutionary-minded clientele got married, had kids and moved on.
But it’s only recently that these cafes have become spacious havens where coffee is very much a secondary concern. As the tagline runs at i-Cafe, whose flagship shop can be found on the seventh and eighth floors of a regular looking office building in Akihabara, the modern “manga kissa” is about providing “Time and Space” for the customer, akin to the “ochaya” and “kissaten” of yore. On an average weekday at i-Cafe Akihabara, about 400 customers — mostly businessmen, “freeters” (part-timers) and students — roll through their doors, a number that rises to 600 on a weekend.
Read the entire article here!
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