Blizzardboy | A Kiwi in Japan

Just posted a link to the Japan section of the linkblog to a site called Canned Coffee.

Canned Coffee is site devoted to – you guessed it – canned coffee. It is a production by Chin Music Press – a company based in both Seattle and Tokyo who are “publishers of beautiful and engaging media and books.”

A site about tins of coffee may sound inane (and it is in an amusing way), but as they say on the about page:

Chin Music Press founder Bruce Rutledge had this to say about canned coffee in an article on the company:

“It became a sort of metaphor for us. Americans tend to focus on the samurai ethic, geisha, blue-suited salarymen, green tea, Zen, etc., and so we wanted … to focus on the equally prominent things that often get overlooked. Canned coffee is the most glaring example of that, I suppose.”

I can understand where he is coming from when is says that. Can coffee is one of those quotidian objects that people living in Japan take for granted. Generally the taste is terrible, but with Starbucks being the best of the best of coffee in Japan, why worry? One isn’t going to get a decent coffee in this country. If you want the best then you will have to go to New Zealand to get it.

While we were away in China and on our travels, can coffee was the one thing I was really hanging out for, and the first thing I did when we got off the plane at KIX airport was to go and have one!