Explore everyday life in Japan
I am a coffee drinker. When I first came to Japan, just about the only words I knew in Japanese were arigatou, karate, and konnichiha. After traveling half way across the country by train to get to the city where I was to live for the following year, meeting my employer and a co-worker for the first time, and being shown into the apartment where I was to live, I desperately needed a cup of coffee. I looked around the apartment. There wasn’t a coffee maker, a French press, or any other coffee making apparatus. The kitchen was incredibly bare, just a single gas burner, a rice-cooker, and a dench range (something that doubles as a microwave and an oven).
Fortunately though, in one of the kitchen drawers, I found a package with five single servings of coffee inside. The servings were like nothing I had ever seen before, pre-measured single servings of ground coffee in filters that had paper arms on them. These arms opened outward and could be placed over the ridge of a coffee mug. All I needed to do was boil water, pour it slowly over the grounds until my mug was full, sit down, and enjoy my cup of coffee; which I did while sitting on the balcony of my new apartment overlooking what was to become my new view.
This kind of pre-packaged single serving coffee, along with instant coffee, can be found all over Japan. Many offices and workplaces have a corner with a sink, a dench range, hot water pots, and an assortment of coffee, tea, and powdered drinks. I have even seen various coffee shops using this kind of filter to make coffee right before their customers' eyes.
Like anything else, the quality and price of this drip coffee varies depending on the brand, but overall, I find it to be fairly inexpensive, and I think that it generally makes a pretty good cup of coffee.
This is an ongoing series that will explore various aspects of daily life in Japan. My hope is that this series will not only reveal to its followers, image by image, what Japan looks like, but that it will also inform its followers about unique Japanese items and various cultural and societal practices. If you are interested in getting regular updates about life in Japan, please consider following me at @boxcarblue. If you have any questions about life in Japan, please don’t hesitate to ask. I will do my best to answer all of your questions.