Tags
Coffee, Kobe, minatojima, museum, UCC
One could be forgiven for being a bit confused about the title of this post. A number of questions spring to mind: 1) Do the Japanese drink a lot of coffee? 2) Being a tea country, what does the average Japanese know about coffee? 3) What is the point of a coffee company having their own museum?
The short answers are: yes on aggregate, not on average; a fair bit; no clue – but it´s Japan. Let´s elaborate a little:
1.- There is a lot of people in Japan (about 128 million of them in the 2010 census, in which I happened to participate in, boosting the ridiculously low share of foreigners) and they consume a lot of stuff, including coffee. According to the International Coffee Organization (ICO) average annual consumption of coffee in Japan is “around 6.8 million bags (a bag being around 60 kg), comprising 4.4 million bags of roasted coffee and 2.4 million bags of soluble coffee”. That is A LOT of coffee, making Japan the third largest importer in the world, only after the USA and Germany. However, the per capita consumption is a meager 3.2 kg a year, far from the first in the ranking, the caffeine-junkies of Finland (11.7 Kg per capita – fuck high blood pressure and insomnia).
2.- Let´s take a country where people know coffee – say, Italy. According to the international coffee council, in 2011 over 92% of the coffee drank in Italy was roasted vs. less than 8% soluble. 72% of that coffee was drunk at home, and from the “out of home” category, only 0.6% was drunk in chains. By contrast, only 68% of the coffee drank in Japan was roasted vs. an staggering 32% share for soluble coffee. Around 65% was drunk at home, and from the 35% drunk outside, around 7% was served in chains. A heavy share of market for soluble coffee and coffee chains typically denotes, in my view, a country without taste buds. To illustrate the point, almost 80% of the coffee drunk in the united kingdom is soluble, and about 15% is served in chains. So we can sum it up by saying: An average Japanese is less coffee-savvy than an average Italian, but is still light-years above an average Brit.
3) The corporate world is weird in Japan. Large conglomerates of companies own every kind of business you can imagine. It is fairly common that the place where you have your latte belongs to the same company you rent your DVDs from (yes, there is still a lot of that in Japan), which built the bicycle you ride, assembled your home appliances and owns the bank you got your mortgage from. Moreover, the coziness of these conglomerates with the regulators are the wet dream of comparable companies in the west. That coziness has, of course, nothing to do with their commercial success 🙂 . Needless to say, these companies typically have cartloads of cash, way more than they need for investment or cash flow purposes. The Ueshima Coffee Company has certainly done well since its humble origins in 1933 and has now over 4000 employees and subsidiaries in different countries. And like every self-respecting large company in Japan, it makes a point out of grooming the corporate history legend. So about a couple of blocks away from their corporate headquarters on the artificial island of Minatojima in Kobe, UCC opened a coffee museum in 1987. To be perfectly honest, the museum is rather lame, but it hast a PRICELESS section: the audiovisual room where you can watch UCC coffee commercials from the 1950s onwards. Remarkable highlights include a full Caribbean orchestra of blackfaced Japanese, delightfully politically incorrect commercials with 1960s Japan gender equality ideas, and in general an intriguing and ultranaïve imagery about coffee, lifestyle and the aspirations of the japanese salaryman.
There are some other interesting sides to the museum, not least their coffee shop. They have an absolutely kickass La Marzocco espresso machine, and they served me the only drip coffee I have ever been impressed by outside Latin America.
So, if you are lucky enough to be in Kobe with some free time in your hands, drop by. You have probably been to less interesting musei in your life, and the coffee in this one is awesome.