English Conversation Cafe

I was really hoping to have a post-worthy conversations and lots of descriptions of weird people from this little excursion, but sadly I don't....  the conversation was pleasant and the people were charming and (for the most part) interesting, polite and.... normal.

There are English Conversation Cafes all over Tokyo supposedly, but the only one that I know about is Mickey House, which Lonely Planet promotes as a kind of landmark institution of the expatriate community for almost three decades now.  It's located in Takadanobaba station near Waseda University.  Non-Japanese native English speakers and Japanese people pay 500 yen (about $5) for entry and bottomless coffee and tea.  Non-Japanese people who don't speak English as their native language have to pay 1000 yen (about $10).


Anyway, you show up, pay the friendly barrista/bar tender/owner your entrance fee, help yourself to coffee or tea and find a spot (the place is very small) at a table that's engaged in conversation that you're interested in.  I was really hoping to have a chance to network with people at this place, but everyone seemed really reluctant to give really any information about their employment, interests, etc.  I was really surprised at the level of sophistication of the people who stayed there... I was expecting to have to stagger though fairly painful conversations with Japanese people who can't speak English but desperately want to learn it ("What are your hobbies?  Oh, I enjoy bowling too.  It is raining today. What kind of food do you like?  Yes, ramen noodles are very delicious."), but everyone there spoke Japanese really, really, really well.  We carried on fluent conversations about environmental engineering, global warming, the NGO sector, volunteerism in Japan, and the fundraising tactics of Japanese and American nonprofits and other such vocabulary-intensive subjects.  I hope will someday be able to speak Japanese as well as they spoke English!

I sat at a table with a mid-40s Korean man who sported a variation of a mullet (long on top, long in back, shaved on the sides).  He was downing kind of grainy looking reddish cocktails or juice or something and getting progressively more outgoing and difficult to understand.  He said he frequents this cafe at least 4 times a week...  Next to him was a kind of fashionable Japanese man who was an executive at a Japanese media company and learned English "by listening to the radio" whatever that means.  He spoke perfect English and described Japan's national pastimes as suffering, complaining, and not thinking for themselves.  Hmmm.  Next to him sat a chubby cheeked Japanese 30-something "salary man" in a crumpled linen suit who studied environmental economics in Lansing, Michigan.  He hadn't known anything about Michigan before he went to the U.S. and selected the program solely on the basis of its reputation.  When I told him I'd been accepted to a graduate program in Michigan, but had decided not to attend, he shyly suggested that I had made the correct decision.  We had a good time imagining what a typical Tokyoite's reaction would be if he or she were to be kind of air lifted and parachuted over rural Michigan without knowing anything about it... shock and disgust, we agreed, would be the likely reaction.  We agreed that the same could probably be said for airlifting and dropping a native New Yorker into rural Japan, as well.