Memoirs from a Japanese Internet Cafe

And so I commenced an intense six-month period in which I went to the cafe every single day, sitting for hours at a time at my terminal and thinking about Friedrich Nietzsche and Japanese literature (the subject of my thesis) and typed and typed. Living as I did at the time, in a tiny one-room apartment in Nishinomiya, a place in which during 10 years residence I never once cooked and usually did little more than sleep and bathe, the internet cafe became my home from home on the other side of Osaka, where I arrived every day around noon and usually stayed until the 9 p.m. closing. No one is likely to write any eulogies to its passing and all we can do is shrug our shoulders and move on, but for a significant chunk of my life in Japan the vanished world of the internet cafe is what defined my experience more than any other institution, and certainly far more than any aspic-preserved festival at a local shrine.

Source: www.japantimes.co.jp