Ridgeline subscribers —

They’re disappearing, the old kissaten. Once slowly, now quickly. Last month we lost Café Ace — a stalwart of Kanda that I was only introduced to a couple of years ago, but never failed to visit when I was in the ’hood. Their nori sandwich was weirdly bewitching, their coffee sweet, their many, many signs hand-painted, delightful, the thickness of paint revealing how prices has changed once or twice over the years. The octogenarian owner had something befall him of the unrecoverable medical variety. No warning. No succession policy. Just a sudden sign on the door: Thanks for your fifty-two years of patronage.

Would someone have taken it over? Possibly. It’s hard to say. But I’ve seen it happen before. In Kissa by Kissa I wrote about a Nagoya kissa called Ran:

“Ran” was run by a guy named Miuchi. For four-and-a-half decades he manned the kissa on his own. Two floors, the second a mezzanine, allowing you to perch and watch the flow of customers in and out. This Miuchi wore sneakers with his vest and tie, seventy-two years old, up and down, day after day, carrying cheese toasts and coffees until suddenly … he fell and died.

Single. Never married. Had no children. His extended family was not interested in running a café. But – seven years before he passed away, the Asanos, two sisters, opened up a flower shop next door. They had a toy poodle, Coco. Miuchi loved Coco, and in time, one imagines, they all came to love one another. Miuchi would swing by the sisters’ flower shop one, two, three times a day, and bring the little thing back during the afternoon customer lull. They were close. When Miuchi’s family put out the word: Does anyone want to carry the Ran baton? Up shot the sisters’ hands.

They took it over and it worked, and worked well.

I took notes and watched the regulars from above – mostly elderly men in patched wool suits and worn trilbies, carrying bunkobon-sized novels or leather briefcases. I was unexpectedly reminded of my own grandfather, who was once a traveling pen salesman. They all seemed glad that the place had been renewed, had found a second wind.

I’m burying the lede: There’s a chance for someone — perhaps even you — to run an old kissa in Tokyo, a beautiful spot in Yushima, near Ueno Park, a place called: French Vouge, located on the first floor of this building. They just closed on July 20. They have until the second week of August to find someone to take over. I’ve never been, but I just stopped by an exhibition about kissaten culture in Bunkyo-ku (I was introduced to the crew running it by Sam, a sento bath house / commons expert mentioned last issue; the free exhibition runs all weekend, stop by if you’re in town!). Haruka Kuryu is the director of the organization behind it all. She brought French Vouge to my attention.

What makes it special? For one thing, the interior was done by Matsukei Shinpei (松樹新平), a 1970s/’80s kissa interior design impresario. If you’ve visited old kissa in Harajuku or Omotesando, you’ve likely seen his work. I’m pretty sure he did Enseigne d’angle (which I’ve been going to for 20 years now and we visited on a recent TOKIO TŌKYŌ TOKYO) and maybe Voleur de Fleurs and maybe Les Jeux Grenier, too? (Spot the pattern!) Anyway, they’re all of the same design language.

But, Vouge — if you are interested in taking it over, that is, running it as is, keeping the interior (why would you want to change it?!) and keeping this forty+-year-old shop going, reply to this email, and I’ll send you the contact info for Kuryu-san. The reason for the short deadline? They’ve been renting the space for nearly half a century, and they have to “revert” it to “zero” in order to return it to the building owner by September. But someone can swoop in, pretty easily, and keep it going as is. I don’t know what the rent is, but I suspect it would be surprisingly not absurd. (Such is the nature/magic of Tokyo.)

Long shot, I know, but damn — I wish we could have saved Café Ace, it was a good one. Kissa are indeed, as the exhibition points out, city oases — private spaces that function, very often, as public commons. As they’re scrubbed, replaced by chain shops, by bland developments, as the city loses these true “3rd spaces,” we also lose the community threads that makes cities and neighbors vibrant and rich. Rich on a human-scale, not on a luxury-apartment scale. That human scale is a thing worth fighting for and preserving, even if we can only save a few old kissa along the way.

C