The 2019 Starbucks Official Book — A Tour of Japan through Its Cafés

2024-04-28

Howard Schultz joined Starbucks in 1982 to work in retail operations and marketing. Inspired by the coffee bars of Milan, he left in 1985 to start Il Giornale in Seattle.

Two years later, Il Giornale bought Starbucks’s assets and adopted its name. Chicago was among the cities Starbucks expanded into in 1987.

That was the beginning of the coffeehouse company most people know today. The name itself points further back, to Starbuck, the first mate in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.

From Ewha to Central Seoul

Starbucks opened its first Korean store near Ewha Womans University on 27 July 1999. Coffee that could cost more than lunch drew criticism early on, but the company went on to become a familiar presence in South Korea.

The concentration around the Gwanghwamun intersection gives a sense of that growth. A walk through this part of central Seoul takes you past one branch after another.

A Place to Spend Time

Starbucks describes its cafés as a third place alongside home and work. You can buy a coffee, sit down and stay a while. That use of the café helps explain why the chain found such a large audience in Korea.

Finding Starbucks in Japan

The chain is also a familiar sight in Japan, especially in major city centres. What caught my attention in the book was how different the cafés could look from one another.

A Japanese Starbucks Official Book

I found this book in the foreign-language section of Kyobo Book Centre in Korea. The title, Starbucks Official Book, was enough to make me curious.

It was shrink-wrapped, so I couldn’t look inside before paying. It cost ₩10,580 at the time, low enough to take a chance on.

The text is in Japanese, but some place names also appear in English. The large photographs and magazine-style layouts make the subject easy enough to follow even if you can’t read every line.

Fifteen Starbucks Locations in Japan

The book takes up three subjects:

  1. Fifteen Starbucks cafés with distinctive designs in Japan
  2. Starbucks Reserve
  3. The history of Starbucks

The locations are spread across the country. Seeing them all would take some effort, but it is easy to use the selection as a way of choosing a stop on a trip you’re already making.

Four of the fifteen are in Osaka, Kyoto and Kobe. That makes them relatively easy to work into a trip through Kansai.

I put the fifteen stores from the book on the map below.

A Starbucks Card for Japan

The book came with a limited-edition Starbucks Card for use in Japan, issued around the opening of Starbucks Reserve Roastery Tokyo.

The card can be loaded with money. To use it for rewards, it needed to be registered with Starbucks Japan at the time. The South Korean app did not accept it.

The book came out in Japan in 2019. Even found in a Seoul bookshop, it feels like the sort of small souvenir you might bring back from a trip.

Book Information

“2019 Starbucks Official Book”

Published by
Starbucks Japan
Publication date
19 February 2019
ISBN
9784800292483
View the book at Kyobo

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