Coffee Shops in Nagasaki City
(and a brief history of coffee in Japan)
Karan Tiwana, Nagasaki City
I want to introduce a handful of my favorite, most memorable coffee shops in Nagasaki City – places to take friends, or to visit with a good book. Don’t let the walls of text stop you: if you’re in a hurry you can skip to the bottom to see the recommendations. If you have a little time to spare, read on and let me berate you with some coffee puns and Nagasaki history.
I’ve been living here in the heart of Nagasaki City for the better part of a year and I’d always freeze up when friends would ask me to recommend a coffee shop. The only way to find out, I thought, was to go to a bunch of coffee shops and see for myself. I set out to gather all the caffeinated empirical evidence I could get my hands on.
I’m not a coffee connoisseur and I don’t want to give the impression of being one. To me, what makes a good coffee shop is the atmosphere, the coffee and food, the price, and so on. In short, this list considers more metrics than just ‘coffee quality’. Having experienced dozens of the coffeehouses of Nagasaki makes me feel like I’ve gained the slightest sense for good and bad coffee so I hope this rundown is of some use to you.
Here’s a table of contents:
- History of Coffee in Nagasaki
- Types of Coffee Shops in Japan
- What is ‘Key Coffee?’
- Coffee Shops Recommendations
- Honorable Mentions
- Tips for Cafe-hopping
1. History of Coffee in Nagasaki
I promise I wouldn’t bore you with a history lesson if it wasn’t relevant to the conversation. Nagasaki City specifically has a long history with coffee so I thought it might be interesting to look into it further. It’s commonly believed that coffee first arrived in Japan in the 18th century by way of Dutch merchants who brought it for their personal consumption. Japan’s isolationist policies during that period (namely, the ‘Sakoku Policy’) limited trade relations to a few foreign nations, many of whom were only permitted entry to Japan through the port of Nagasaki. Of these nations, Dutch merchants were restricted to the artificial island of Dejima, Nagasaki. It’s true of coffee and of many other Western imports: that Nagasaki was their gateway into Japan. Living in Nagasaki, a city steeped in history, I can’t help but wonder the sorts of stories these walls would tell if they could talk.
Coffee didn’t catch on amongst Japanese people during the isolationist period, but now it’s loved all across Japan. A historically significant cafe in the city is Tsuruchan, operating in Nagasaki City since 1925 and known as the first coffee shop in all of Kyushu. More on that later.
Tabelog, a restaurant listing site, reports that there are over 450 coffee shops in Nagasaki City, and over 1300 in the prefecture. Corroborating this, it seems to me that there’s a hole-in-the-wall coffee shop every time I turn the corner.
2. Types of Coffee Shops in Japan
There are a few main categories of coffee shops in Japan.
The European-style ‘cafe’ and the home-brewed (pun intended) varieties of ‘kissaten’ and ‘junkissa’.
The term kissaten (喫茶店 (きっさてん): lit. ‘tea-drinking shop’; commonly ‘Japanese-style coffee shop’) originally comes from the tradition of teahouse culture brought to Japan from China in the 12th-14th century Kamakura period. Kissaten were traditionally social gathering venues centered around drinking tea, pivoting to coffee towards the late-19th century. Though kissaten today are more commonly associated with coffee than tea, teas and other drinks are often sold as well.
Contemporary kissaten tend to be warm, eclectic, and quaint.
They’re a quiet reprieve for people looking to chat with friends or get some work done over coffee. Kissaten generally have a small menu of drinks, desserts, and sandwiches, and some may offer breakfast or lunch menus at certain times of the day. Kissaten are generally independently-owned, and may sell alcohol as well. You go to a kissaten for great vibes and coffee, knowing that it’s a little more intimate than a cafe.
In the early Showa era (1920s or so), kissaten were focusing more on selling alcohol and hiring waitresses to entertaining customers. While this shift attracted a new demographic, it pushed some customers away. Initially these were called tokushukissa (特殊喫茶 (とくしゅきっさ): ’specialty coffee shops’) to differentiate from regular kissaten but for a time they became very prevalent. In response, the term junkissa (純喫茶 (じゅんきっさ): ‘pure coffee shop’) came into use to describe coffee shops ‘purely’ for enjoying coffee. Over time, tokushukissa fell out of popularity (with tokushukissa shops rebranding to bars or lounges instead), but the term junkissa stuck around.
A junkissa is to a kissaten what a coffee shop is to a cafe: a shop primarily selling coffee and light snacks or desserts (but coffee shop is also what you could call any kind of place that sells coffee, and we’re caught up in semantics once again).
With junkissa, the welcoming feeling comes from the impression that from the owners, the menu, the sights, smells, sounds and tastes-nothing in the coffee shop has changed in decades while the surrounding city might have become unrecognizable. One of my favorite coffee shops in the city is a junkissa, and stepping into it is like stepping into 1980s Japan.
In three words, junkissa are bright, distinctive, and nostalgic.
Cafes in Japan borrow from European coffee shop culture, specifically from France, developing alongside kissaten through the 1900s. From the first Japanese cafe opening in 1911 Ginza (a trendy social hub of Tokyo even a hundred years ago), they distinguished themselves from kissaten of the time by serving coffee, food, drinks, and functioning as gathering hubs for artists and academics. Cafes are places for social gathering at any time of day, so they tend to have a lively feeling.
Contemporary cafes tend to be cool, polished, and vibrant.
In the past there was a legal distinction between cafes and kissaten. A cafe is a combination of a coffee shop, restaurant, and bar, so they need a restaurant business license under Japan’s Food Sanitation Act. In the past, the FSA had a special coffee shop business license which made it easier in several ways to open a coffee shop. This change reflects the blurry line between cafe and kissaten. In colloquial usage, it’s not some faux pas to mistake a kissaten for a cafe or vice versa. I will, however, silently judge you if you start calling Starbucks a kissaten.
Here’s quick summary of the types of coffee shops in Japan:
- Kissaten are like your favorite hole-in-the-wall bar; the serve the same drinks you could get anywhere else, but you come here for something intangible that you don’t find in the other bars.
- A Junkissa places a little more focus on coffee. They may roast and grind their own coffee beans, or any other number of things to make their coffee the highlight of your experience.
- At a cafe, the coffee is a key part of the experience, but the central point is the atmosphere which is perfect for socializing.
- A ‘coffee shop’ coffee shop is, like the junkissa, a shop focussed on selling coffee. They usually have a limited selection of coffee, drinks, and desserts or baked goods; a cafe minus the wider range of food options.
3. What is ‘Key Coffee’?
It’s very likely you’ve seen this logo somewhere in Japan; this blue and yellow sign is everywhere. Long story short, Key Coffee is a manufacturer-supplier of coffee products that works with coffee shops. They began putting up these signposts in the 70s as a way to promote kissaten. Today it serves as a baseline of quality for coffee shops, as in a coffee shop serving Key Coffee blends is going to have quality on par with (if not better than) chain coffee shops.
Unless a coffee shop owner is very passionate about coffee and takes on the challenge of importing beans themselves, they are quite likely to use a supplier like Key Coffee. These suppliers significantly lowers the barrier of entry to running a coffee shop in Japan and I argue are a major contributor as to why chain coffee shops haven’t dominated the Japanese coffee industry to the same extent as in North America, where vertical integration (when businesses control multiple or all parts of their supply chain) is the standard. I’m no business expert, so take this analysis with a grain of salt.
4. Recommended Coffee Shops in Nagasaki City
I’m going to recommend four coffee shops total that have stood out to me in my cafe-hopping escapades. I stand by these four shops that I’m recommending as shops that you should visit at least once if you’re in Nagasaki City and into coffee. There’ll be a list of honorable mentions below of a few other unique and cool coffee shops in the city.
Fuji Coffee (富士珈琲) in the Shindaikumachi shopping district is my favorite kissaten thus far. The interior oozes nostalgia, with wood-paneling, orange rust-colored swivel chairs and warm lighting. The atmosphere is comforting, the coffee and food is excellent as well, all for a very reasonable price. There is counter seating if you’d like to chat with the baristas, or table seating to chat with friends or study. You see customers of all ages coming to talk or study over coffee because enjoying a slice of the retro Showa aesthetic is fun for all generations.
Cafe Hirai (CAFE 平井) in Dejimamachi is a cafe in a scenic, historic part of town and is full of charm. The coffee is excellent, the food is very delicious, and the owners are an older couple who love chatting with customers. I’ve visited several times and my impression of the cafe gets even better with each experience. It has both counter and table seating and can accommodate a dozen or so customers.
PUHA Coffee Stand, on Sakuramachi Street is a modern ‘pure’ coffee shop. It’s got a nice atmosphere and great coffee to match. The food menu is limited to cakes and deserts, and though more expensive than some other options on this list, it’s certainly worth the price. It accommodates a little over a dozen people with a mix of tables and counter seating. Wonderful staff and a very cozy coffee shop vibe.
Coffee Specialty Sasayakizaka (珈琲専科 囁き坂 (コーヒーせんか ささやきざか)). Halfway up a scenic stone-paved road is a junkissa whose name when translated means ‘whispering slope.’ If you walk by this area in the evenings you might catch the scent of roasting coffee beans. I suppose that’s the ‘whispering’ part. The inside of the shop looks almost like an alchemist’s lab, with glass jars and flasks of all sorts; I think it’s a little unconventional but worth experiencing. The highlight of this shop is the coffee and the atmosphere. I found the food menu a little lacking in quality and presentation, but acceptable for the price. It seats about a dozen people (a mix of counter and table seating) but I often see ‘reserved’ signs on the tables when I walk in. If you’re visiting with a group, it’s best to call ahead and ask if there’s space.
5. Honorable Mentions
Having visited 32 cafes in the city as of writing this blog, it was very challenging to narrow down the list to a few top coffee shops. There were several that were equally excellent but too similar to each other, or too far out of the way from the city center. There was also the question of whether to include chain coffee shops in the top ranking, which I decided against. Instead of expanding the top recommendations, I’ve made an honorable mentions list of coffee shops which are great or notable in their own way, but are beaten out by the ones listed above.
Attic Coffee. They have several locations around the city, of which I’d like to mention the one by Meganebashi. Attic has great coffee and food, is reasonable in price, and is one of the cafe’s I’ve visited the most often. It’s great, but it felt unfair to rank it among the top cafes which each had a little more uniqueness.
June Coffee. The location near Hamanomachi is a corner shop with floor to ceiling windows, so it’s an especially nice cafe to just sit and people-watch. A little expensive though.
Coffee YOSIO (珈琲 YOSIO). It’s in Hamanomachi as well and it’s quite special. It’s a ‘jazz cafe’, where you can relax to some jazz. The coffee was great, the cheesecake was exceptionally fluffy, and it’s got a nice view of the shopping district out the window. Be warned that the cafe has a strong cigarette smell (it’s one of few places I’ve seen still to allow indoor smoking), though considering the target demographic for a jazz cafe, it comes with the territory.
NGS Coffee. It’s an interesting cafe right next to Stadium City with some strange espresso concoctions and very creamy cheesecake. I’ve come to like their ‘ginger espresso’, which is a shot of espresso in ginger ale. It shares seating space with a bakery which provides some nice sweet and savory food options.
Martin Cafe. It’s just outside the Shindaikumachi shopping district. It’s a quaint second story cafe with a nice view of the street down below. The speakers are usually playing American pop or hip-hop from the 2000s, if that’s your kind of thing. The vibes are nice, and it’s only a short walk from Suwa Shrine, so it’s a nice pit stop to make if you’re already in that area for some sightseeing.
Cafe Sevilla. It’s an elegant second story cafe right beside City Hall. It’s right above a confectionary store and it’s easier to enter through the store than the staircase on the side of the building. The menu is simplistic, limited to a few drinks and varieties of castella. It’s worth checking out if you’re stopping by City Hall, but it’s a little expensive and small on portion sizes.
Tsuru Chan. It’s the cafe I alluded to much earlier in my ramblings: the oldest cafe in Kyushu. It was opened in 1925 and celebrated its 100 year anniversary on May 2nd. It’s cool for the historic significance and the food/coffee is decent, with incredibly short wait times for the drink menu. Unfortunately though, it’s become a bit of a tourist trap. Covered in signatures and pictures of famous guests, its reputation gets in its own way and hinders the experience. I couldn’t allude to this super famous and historic cafe in my writeup without going there myself and reporting on it first-hand, so here we are. As a coffee shop, it doesn’t make even the top 10 in the city, but I suppose it’s worth knowing about.
6. Tips for Cafe-hopping
What I recommend is that, without looking anything up beforehand, you pick a street to meander down and stumble into the first open coffee shop you see. There’s a different kind of magic in finding a coffee shop through chance like this because there’s a non-zero (okay, a basically-zero) percent chance that when you look for it again someday, you might come to find that a coffee shop never existed there in the first place. Hmm. Maybe this ranking of coffee shops is leaning a little too far into whimsy: let’s dial it back a little.
I definitely stand by this method of cafe-hopping. Especially with the prevalence of the KC signposts, there are good coffee shops around every corner for those with a keen eye. Once I’ve stumbled onto a new cafe, I’ll check out the menu if they have it posted outside, otherwise I head straight in and let them surprise me. If I can’t see a KC sign and the exterior looks like it’s seen better days, I might do a quick google search and check the reviews before heading in. This vibes-based cafe-hopping strategy has helped me find many cool cafes that don’t show up on google maps. I think it’s good to have a couple familiar places to keep in your back pocket, but having those unique experience brings its own kind of fun. Thanks for reading, and good luck!
