Merry White

discusses

Coffee Life in Japan

Date

May
18
Friday
May 18, 2012
3:00 PM

Location

Harvard Book Store
1256 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138

Tickets

This event is free; no tickets are required.

Harvard Book Store and the Japan Society of Boston are pleased to welcome professor MERRY WHITE for a discussion of her new book on Japanese cafe culture, Coffee Life in Japan.

This fascinating bookpart ethnography, part memoirtraces Japan's vibrant café society over one hundred and thirty years. Merry White traces Japan's coffee craze from the turn of the twentieth century, when Japan helped to launch the Brazilian coffee industry, to the present day, as uniquely Japanese ways with coffee surface in Europe and America. Coffee Life in Japan takes up themes as diverse as gender, privacy, perfectionism, and urbanism. White shows how coffee and coffee spaces have been central to the formation of Japanese notions about the uses of public space, social change, modernity, and pleasure. White describes how the café in Japan, from its start in 1888, has been a place to encounter new ideas and experiments in thought, behavior, sexuality , dress, and taste. It is where a person can be socially, artistically, or philosophically engaged or politically vocal. It is also, importantly, an urban oasis, where one can be private in public.

Professor White has recently been awarded the Japan Society’s John E. Thayer Award, which annually recognizes significant achievements by an individual or institution in the field of U.S.-Japan relations. 

Merry White
Merry White

Merry White

Merry White is a professor at Boston University. She presently is engaged in research on urban social spaces and social change in Japan. Her teaching includes courses on Japanese society, women in Asia, food and culture, and the anthropology of travel and tourism. Dr. White’s past work includes books on Japanese education (The Japanese Educational Challenge), internationalization (The Japanese Overseas), adolescence and popular culture (The Material Child), and family and social policy (Perfectly Japanese). She has also published work on education and international development, women in Japan, and even two cookbooks, Noodles Galore and Cooking for Crowds. In addition, her work includes essays on food and culture published in Gastronomica and in other media.

Harvard Book Store
1256 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138

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