Media and identity in Japan

July 13th, 2006

The first Gran Cyber Café opened in 1999. Today there are 10, serving some 5,000 people a day. Each has a slightly different orientation – some are geared to teenagers, some to salarymen – but the atmosphere is the same throughout the franchise: equal parts lending library, newsstand, arcade, Kinko’s and youth hostel. An inspired extension of the basic Internet cafe, the Gran Cyber Cafés shift their meaning the more you study them, as if by a trick of their trademark low light.

Browsing for comic books at the Bagus Gran Cyber Café in Tokyo. Photo: Ko Sasaki for The New York Times

Writes the New York Times

Sometimes they look like nothing special, only marginally cooler than carrels you might find at a college library. But at other times, especially late at night, they seem visionary, an architectural realization of the social and personal life of the future
The first Gran Cyber Café opened in 1999. Today there are 10, serving some 5,000 people a day. Each has a slightly different orientation ? some are geared to teenagers, some to salarymen – but the atmosphere is the same throughout the franchise: equal parts lending library, newsstand, arcade, Kinko’s and youth hostel. An inspired extension of the basic Internet cafe, the Gran Cyber Cafés shift their meaning the more you study them, as if by a trick of their trademark low light.
Sometimes they look like nothing special, only marginally cooler than carrels you might find at a college library. But at other times, especially late at night, they seem visionary, an architectural realization of the social and personal life of the future.

Only in Japan

What they do there is up to them. Some people channel-surf. Others trade stocks. You can download music, read novels, watch pornography, play video games, have sex, go to sleep.
According to Mr. Isshow, Japan’s “petit iede,” or little runaways, come for downtime, free lattes and smoothies, and, at some branches, showers. They use the places as trial separations from home – staying a few hours, overnight or a few days, long enough to scare their parents. (A “night pack” allows use of the pod from 11 p.m. to 8 a.m. for about $10; some places sell toothbrushes and underwear too.) Periodically the management will remind a customer that the cafe is not a hotel, but above all Bagus respects people’s privacy.

A social perspective

Hidenori Kimura, a sociologist who writes about intercultural encounters, said he believes the Gran Cyber Caf?s fulfill a deep and persistent cultural longing. The Japanese system of competition for education, career and social esteem, Dr. Kimura explained, forces young people to obsess over self-presentation, which costs them both fantasy and anonymity, the privileges of childhood. What Japanese young people want, in his view, are opportunities to be free of their social status.
Nobody cares what you do, which enables you to be absorbed in whatever fantasy you want to indulge in through Net surfing, Web games or manga. Yet you can satisfy your timid desire to belong.

Staying in the Gran Cyber Cafés, he concluded, is now part of jibun-sagashi, or the search for the true self.

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