Ahhh, Japanese cafes changed my life. There is so much variety among them. I really discovered my passion for community when I discovered that even in a cold, numb city like Tokyo, even with a culture where talking to strangers is almost unheard of in most situations, somehow a strong sense of community develops in the local shops, especially cafes.

I found cafes for almost every subculture I could imagine. Most of my favorite were for younger crowds but there was one jazz cafe where the owner would burn me jazz CDs and try to teach me about jazz because I was still new to the genre. She burned a CD every single time I came and half the time she wouldn't let me pay for my meals. I had 2 huge stacks of maybe 100 CDs....it was so hard to part with them when I left Japan but they took up too much space to carry all of them.