A look at a Manga Cafe in Japan
© Japanator.com
Manga Cafes in America
By: Nadia OxfordDate: Thursday, April 24, 2008
Anime and manga fans in San Francisco are excited about the impending birth of manga cafe.
“What's a manga cafe?”
A good manga cafe provides its customers with a great taste sensation. You haven't lived until you've tasted ham and butter sandwiched between copies of Sailor Moon and Osamu Tezuka's Phoenix. Little hard on the digestion, though.
...Okay, seriously though. In Japan, manga cafes are popular areas of repose. Most cafes offer internet access, comfy chairs, snacks, drinks and (of course) manga. For an hourly fee that usually works out to around 400 yen an hour (approximately $4-$5 US), customers can kick up their feet, surf the Internet and read from a large library of manga. Some manga cafes go the extra mile and provide users with a place to shower and sleep.
The opening of a manga cafe in the United States is pretty exciting. It'll be interesting to see what kind of services will be offered. In theory, a public place to shower and catch a nap is a great idea for our harried modern society, where finding time to do either can be a real challenge when you're out and about. On the other hand, cleanliness and personal responsibility for one's immediate environment is a little more ingrained in Japanese society. In the United States, it would only be a matter of time before someone peed in the showers, or worse. There's a general fear of public facilities on this side of the ocean (“Oh my God don't sit on the toilet seat, you'll get AIDS!”) that's not entirely unjustified.
It's a bit of a shame, because people with chronically low energy (for example, me) can really benefit from little power naps on a surface other than a computer keyboard or a meeting room.
So what will San Francisco's manga cafe (named MIKA) offer? Not much will be known until it opens this weekend. If Mika's website is anything to go by, it'll probably be pretty Spartan. And hopefully not so pink. Still, a manga library is a given, and there will probably be vending machines.
It'll be interesting to see what kind of challenges an American manga cafe will face. For instance, manga publishers in Japan aren't too happy with the cafe scene because the manga-ka don't see any profits from borrowed manga. The profits go directly to the establishment, unlike libraries, which don't see any profit at all. How will Tokyopop and Viz react to people thumbing through their titles for free? Chances are neither company will care much unless the manga cafe scene catches on and takes off over here.But will it take off? It's likely. Manga cafes are pretty safe business ventures. Internet cafes, for example, are still surviving and even thriving in an environment where nearly everyone owns their own computer and high-speed internet. Overhead in San Francisco isn't cheap, but the expenses to run a library-type environment are probably not astronomical. Anyone who runs a manga cafe probably won't live like royalty, but it might certainly be profitable enough to become widespread.
