Coffee in the North
It goes without saying, but living in the north, you never come across a coffee tree. Even so, I must have known the shape of a coffee bean since I was a child.
My father mostly drinks nothing more than instant coffee, and my mother doesn’t like coffee and hardly ever drinks it. I didn’t like coffee either, until I was nearly thirty.
I began running a café with some friends, and we served hand-drip coffee there. That, I suppose, is when I started drinking it. It was only about five years ago that I came to know specialty coffee. These days, even when I go travelling, I make a point of seeking out specialty coffee.
It isn’t that I know a great deal about coffee, or that I can really tell one taste from another. And yet there is something strangely interesting about it.
Genetically, it seems, I am not especially sensitive to caffeine, but if I drink several cups in a day, or drink a lot in a short time, I start to feel unwell. Not that this is the reason, but I never end up going round several cafés in a day and drinking cup after cup.
Still, when I drink coffee in the morning my head clears and I feel energised. I drink it because I like that; that is the main thing. For me, coffee is also a way of topping up my energy. It sharpens me up. And if I am going to drink it every day, I would rather it tasted good. That is about all there is to it.
Even here in Hokkaido, I sometimes hear that such-and-such a place is where Hokkaido’s coffee culture began, or that this was the first coffee shop in Hokkaido.
In cold Hokkaido, how did the first person to drink that black, bitter thing (or sour thing) feel about it? It is an everyday pleasure for everyone now, but at first it must have been something precious. And it was a gift from a distant country with no connection to Hokkaido at all.
In Hokkaido, things sometimes develop in ways that have nothing to do with orthodoxy or tradition, like soup curry. In the pioneering days, when there was nothing, nobody could afford to worry about what was orthodox or traditional. You used your body and your head to survive. Unless anything went, you could not live. Perhaps it was that kind of time. And perhaps that still remains, even now, in Hokkaido’s DNA.
It is far from where coffee is grown. Precisely because Hokkaido is so far away, couldn’t an interesting coffee culture be born here? One that develops in its own peculiar way, the kind that people from Honshu, Japan’s main island, would call “that’s not coffee.” And then one day, people would come all the way to Hokkaido to drink it.
Quietly looking forward to the day that happens, I am drinking coffee again today.
