Inside a Japanese Sharehouse by Caitlin Meagher

Author:Caitlin Meagher [Meagher, Caitlin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Ethnic Studies, Research, Regional Studies
ISBN: 9781000283136
Google: MBQHEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-12-29T01:01:44+00:00

‘A café-like space where we gather and live’

The closest analogy owners and marketers have found for the ‘third space’-iness of the sharehouse as a realm distinct from family and work is the café. Merry White suggests that Japanese cafés are a ‘private-in-public’ (White 2012: 20) that offer a ‘neutral or unmarked social space between public and private zones’ (White 2012: 36). The café transcends the simple binarisation of uchi and soto because it requires neither the obligatory intimacy of the family (that sometimes finds expression in the obligation to amae, as we saw in Chapter 2) nor the workplace’s required obedience to vertical structure. According to White,

The café… is a ‘third space’ that offers what neither [home nor work] offer (sic), a place where the responsibilities of those primary locations have no weight and a place where the definitions of the individual are concomitantly lighter and more fluid. In workplaces, strong pressure for performance and loyalty is brought to bear on individuals whose identity is wrapped up tightly in the organisation. Home was a place of serious endeavour as well… The café can … be seen as an alternative community, not replacing either of the primary ones, but through supplying respite space it may actually facilitate or support participation in the spaces that ‘count’.

(White 2012: 25)

Sharehouse marketing encourages this association between sharehouses and coffee shops in a number of ways. First, the majority of the large-scale sharehouses I observed, including Cheznew, featured a ‘café space’ as a standard facility. The gargantuan Anteroom Osaka has two ‘café’ areas, and Mr Tsujimoto, Anteroom’s architect and project manager, confirmed that these were to encourage ‘free interaction and peaceful relaxation’. Sharehouse café spaces are separate from food preparation areas and dining areas and rarely contain any coffee-making equipment, although they often contain books available to all residents to borrow or read onsite. Without coffee and its accoutrements, their resemblance to a ‘café’ is therefore symbolic, as a quasi-public space for spontaneous socialisation.

In addition to the provision of cafés within sharehouses, many sharehouses are marketed on the concept of the sharehouse-as-café, like Chiba’s ‘At home café’, the ‘Kyoto Café Sharehouse’, Osaka’s ‘Plow & Co.’, Yamanashi’s ‘café a casa’, Kamakura’s ‘Goyatei’, and Tokyo’s ‘Couri’: the five properties that compose the CafeHouse Tokyo’s ‘CaféShare Series’. Hitsuji Real Estate describes the Bauhaus Minami Senju sharehouse as a ‘café-like space where we gather and live’, and insists that ‘this international atmosphere is more like a café or bar than a home’ (Hitsuji 2010: 12). Meanwhile, websites titled ‘roomshare café’ and ‘sharehouse café’ profile available rooms and proffer advice for sharehouse residents.

Recently, an editorial in the architecture and urban planning journal 10+1 lauded nomadic place-making as a response to the difficulties faced by young people and as a strategy for local revitalisation. It encapsulates the themes of difference from the family home, resemblance to the café, and the deficiency of the public/private binary. It reads, in part:

In the past the house was entirely closed off as a perfectly private place for the family only.

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