Doutor is the coffee chain you see on street corners and station concourses all over Tokyo, with a yellow sign and cheap coffee. Doutor says that when it opened its first shop in 1980, drinking standing up was thought bad manners in Japan. Its founder bet that he could change that.

Paris at 8 a.m.

In 1971 Toba Hiromichi, a Tokyo coffee roaster, joined a trade tour of Europe. One morning he walked down the Champs-Élysées and watched commuters climb out of the Metro and pour into cafés. They crowded the counter two and three deep, drinking coffee on their feet, even though tables were free. Standing was the cheap way to drink; sitting cost more. Toba thought: this is it.

At home, coffee meant a kissaten, an old-style coffee shop where you sit down and are served. Doutor says they were mostly dim places, charging about ¥300 a cup. Toba, the company says, had also noticed salarymen hurrying along station platforms eating a bean-paste bun with a bottle of milk. He wanted standing to become fashionable.

Half the price, nine tsubo

He set the price before he knew how to meet it: ¥150, half the going rate. That meant automatic coffee machines, an imported conveyor toaster and dishwasher, and, since there was no room for a real kitchen, a bread-and-sausage hot dog he called the "German dog".

The shop was tiny, nine tsubo, about 30 square metres. Toba has said it had been a sushi shop whose owner's heir did not want to run it. The heir had asked to open one of Toba's Café Colorado shops instead. Toba talked him into the standing format, and promised to cover him if it failed.

It opened on 18 April 1980, in front of Harajuku Station.

The first customer

Toba went to Harajuku early on opening day and watched who came in. He had expected office workers or students. A trade-press account says the first customers were an elderly couple, then a woman with a dog. Toba wrote that an older customer made him feel it could work.

He wrote that within days the shop was serving hundreds of people a day. A year later there were four shops, and three years later twenty. By 1994 the Yomiuri newspaper listed Doutor's standing shops among the chains multiplying fast. Tokyo's kissaten had peaked at over 20,000 in 1982, and had halved to about 10,000.

Doutor's Harajuku shop on Omotesando, photographed in 2011. It is not the 1980 building.

See it yourself

  • The kissaten. On the Shinjuku morning tour you start in a kissaten like Tajimaya, open since 1964, where you sit down for a siphon-brewed coffee. This is the kind of place Toba was betting against.
  • The corner chain. Walk to the station afterwards and you will pass a Doutor. Today's shops have seats, but the standing counter is where it began.

Hear it on the tour

Sources

Photo credits

  • A Doutor Coffee shop front on Omotesando in Harajuku: ysakaki / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0, resized