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The relationship between Zheng Yongqing and the Cafe

Published: 2026-04-23 Author: World Gafei

Last Updated: 2026/04/23, In Japan, cafes also became popular among intellectuals and then among the general public by virtue of the cultural movement. On April 13, 1888, the first coffee shop in Japan opened twice in Tokyo's Ueno Nishimen-cho (another said that the earliest coffee shop in Japan was the washing Pavilion opened in Tokyo's Nippon Bridge in 1886). The owner, Zheng Yongqing, also has a special relationship with China.

In Japan, cafes also became popular among intellectuals and then among the general public by virtue of the cultural movement. On April 13, 1888, Japan's first coffee shop opened twice in Tokyo's Ueno Nishimen-cho (another said that the earliest coffee shop in Japan was the "washing Pavilion" opened in Tokyo's Nippon Bridge in 1886). The owner, Zheng Yongqing, also has a special relationship with China. He is the adopted son of Zheng Yongning, a descendant of Tian Chuan Qi Zuo Weimen, a younger brother of Zheng Chenggong. Born in Nagasaki in 1859, he studied at Yale University in the United States and is proficient in Chinese, English, French and Japanese. As a senior intellectual, Zheng Yongqing pursues to promote coffee as a kind of literati spirit. Taking the teahouse acceptable to the Japanese literati at that time as a signboard, he named his coffee shop "can you teahouse" and sold Westerners' coffee in it. The Japanese pronunciation of "can" is similar to that of "coffee", and later it even became a fixed translation of "coffee" in Japanese. As a beverage first liked by cultural people, coffee had a lot of literary translation at that time, including "can not", "bone non -", "bone happiness", "Jiaxi" and so on. Some people have named it "Tang Tea", "Xiangtang" and so on. Zheng Yung-ching also complied with this trend and put all kinds of books, newspapers and periodicals in his own coffee shop, even the four treasures of the study, in short, he strived to integrate the aroma of books and coffee. At that time, Japanese intellectuals also had many interesting hobbies when they went to cafes. For example, some people would bring geisha to cafes to accompany reading, while others, like Mr. Lu Xun, showed up frequently in cafes but never drank a cup of coffee. Because in the eyes of people at that time, it was important to sit in front of the high-back seat of the cafe, with a popular literary publication spread out on the table, and it didn't matter whether it was coffee, green tea or even boiled water.

Zheng Yongqing's "can not teahouse" eventually closed down quietly after four years of opening because of its high style, poor management and successive years of deficit. However, the coffee culture craze set off by "whether the teahouse" has led to the emergence of successors. In 1890, the Gem Coffee Shop in Asakusa, Tokyo, officially opened. In 1909, Caf é Paulista, the first generation of Brazilian immigrant Mizuno in Japan, got free coffee bean sponsorship from Brazil, thus opening chain stores all over Japan. The Tokyo branch, which was founded in 1911, still stands opposite the toy store of the Badingmu Museum in Ginza. At that time, the advertising slogan of this coffee shop was "hot coffee as black as ghosts, sweet as love, and hot as hell." and the coffee here is cheap and good, only 5 cents per cup, plus 5 cents, and you can get a doughnut. So it attracted many young scholars at that time and college students from nearby Keio University to stop here. It is said that Akita Yuki, a member of the Esperanto Popularization Society at that time, often bought only one cup of coffee but occupied 10 seats, and held a seminar here every week, which was praised as an example of being stingy.

When it first opened, the Old S ã o Paulo Cafe had a hostess department on the second floor. In 1911, Aoki, a women's magazine founded by Hirazuka Thunderbird, often held editorial meetings in the concierge department, where a group of fashionable and famous women gathered to talk and sat all afternoon. "Green Shock" is an 18th century British "Bluestockings" female literati, and blue socks later became a symbol of new women in Japan. Although today's "Old S ã o Paulo Cafe" has cancelled the hostess department, female guests in blue socks are still given special treatment and coffee money can be waived. I also heard that once Lennon and Yoko Ono stayed in Ginza and came here for three consecutive nights to order the shop's signature Paulista Old to drink. This kind of mixed coffee has been on the menu since its inception. Yoko Ono can be regarded as a new woman. I wonder if she went there wearing blue socks at that time.

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