Culture Cafe

Finding Friends at the Culture Cafe

For foreign students in Japan, meeting Japanese students can be surprisingly difficult. I have experienced this difficulty first-hand while attending Kyushu University. As an exchange student following the typical pattern of most foreign students in Japan, I too lived in the dormitory for international students and took the usual language and culture classes. However, unlike most students who return home after a year or two of study, I chose to stay and enter the Master’s Program in Human- Environment Studies. It was from this time that I decided to apply what I had learned in environmental psychology toward solving a problem I sensed as both strange and very unfortunate: international students at Kyushu University had stopped looking for Japanese friends.
The Kyushu University International House was where I first gave up looking for Japanese friends. I lived there during my first year in Fukuoka, and yes, I did manage to make a number of new friends from my tiny, one-person room on the first floor of the (then) all-male, five-story “Building E.” There were the other American students, all strangely bunched on the upper floors of the same building. Most of them were here for just one year, for a year of study abroad. Then there were my Korean, Chinese, and Brazilian friends, just to mention the nationalities that stand out most in my mind. They were scattered throughout the many buildings of the International House, and though it was often difficult to keep track of where everybody lived, we always managed to keep tabs on each other in our new, closed-knit community.
There were, however, a couple of Japanese students living in the International House as resident assistants, but they were graduate students with many time restraints, and we learned not to expect them to attend all the parties and other social gatherings we had. As for the many undergraduate students of Kyushu University who may have wanted to come to the International House to make new friends or join a party, most either didn’t have a car or couldn’t afford to visit on a regular basis. And though I had found a few friends in my research group with whom I could talk, I nonetheless found myself speaking Japanese most with the other foreign students in the International House rather than with Japanese students. That year I sure learned a lot about the Korean Peninsula and Nisei lifestyles in Brazil, but I was still in the dark about how our Japanese neighbors lived. No people, no communication.
The second place I had to give up looking for Japanese companions was at the International Student Center (ISC), which is the building where almost all new foreign students take Japanese language and culture classes. I was no exception, taking kanji and grammar classes my first year. Again I found myself surrounded by my International House neighbors. We even parked our bicycles in the same place. Of course there were some faces I didn’t know, but one characteristic had not changed: there were no Japanese students here.
And they never came. I sometimes would see some Japanese students hanging around the first floor of the ISC, but a little eavesdropping would quickly reveal that they were there specifically to hear a speech (there is a large auditorium on the first floor) or to sit through an orientation for their own future study abroad adventures. This was merely a transitory stay, a brief stopover during their academic journeys, and thus we never saw them again. Again, no people, no communication.
In 1998, my first year of graduate studies at Kyushu University, I was given the opportunity to change this situation of being alongside, but not with, Japanese students. I got together with a group of classmates from my department, and armed with some funding from the Kyushu University Venture Business Laboratory, we brainstormed for ideas on how we could make our campus more enjoyable and conducive to communication among students, especially to communication between foreign students and Japanese students.

What we came up with was simple yet creative, new yet familiar: a coffee shop. We built an outdoor cafe directly on campus that provided everyone the opportunity to enjoy inexpensive coffee or tea in an open atmosphere, free of any departmental affiliation or label. We named it the “Culture Cafe,” to express its function as a coffee shop while encouraging a wide-ranging mix of social exchange among students from various cultural backgrounds. In addition, by having all cafe staff positions filled by students, we ensured the cafe would remain ‘local’ and not appear foreign. These staff were mostly undergraduate students from a number of departments, including engineering, education, and agriculture. Working hours were flexible, and there was almost always an interesting mix of foreign and Japanese students working at any given time. As for the customers, not only a variety of students, but also professors, librarians, cafeteria workers, and even local citizens, who were not directly associated with the university, became our regular customers.
In this way, what began in 1998 as a pipe dream for an adventurous group of students had become a prominent campus feature by the year 2000. Though only a small-scale project, I believe the Culture Cafe takes an important step toward improving the communication gap between Japanese students and international students by providing a pleasant place for snacks and social interaction on campus. As William H. Whyte notes in his book, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, “Food attracts people who attract more people.” I believe it.

By Chad Walker, 1st Year Ph.D. student, Human-
Environment Studies, Kyushu University

Previous Page Top Next