khyungbird (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} khyungbird) wrote,@ 2008-04-29 00:31:00 |
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Manga Cafe Mika
Thanks to Deb Aoki who told me about the news I had missed while I was overseas, I was lucky enough to attend the pre-opening weekend of Manga Cafe Mika, the first Japanese manga cafe in San Francisco. There's one other Japanese manga cafe in New York city, Manga Cafe Atom, and there's a few Korean and Chinese manga cafes scattered here and there from what I hear, but Mika is one of a very, very small number of pioneers ploughing this hopefully fertile ground.
Located in San Francisco's Japantown, Cafe Mika wasn't fully ready for business when I went in on May 26 -- the Internet computers weren't set up and there was just one pot of coffee chugging away -- but it was thrilling to set foot inside it and browse. According to the owners, a lot of the cafe's manga stock came from a manga cafe in Okinawa, so there were tons of tankobon of mysterious older manga -- shojo, shonen, seinen and josei from the '70s and 80s -- to please my retro-manga tastes. There were also shelves of more recent popular titles -- in the photos you can see a nice set of Emma, the Welcome to the NHK and Haruhi Suzumiya manga, and more. They've also got a good selection of recent shojo, shonen and other popular series -- the Shonen Jump lineup and so forth. But listing specific titles is just going to leave people asking "But do they have -----?" and I can only answer, "Probably." It's a small cafe, but they have a good selection. As someone who's fruitlessly tried to convince Kinokuniya staff to let me read their manga for free, a huge smile spread on my face to see those very same tankobon without shrinkwrap, delectably available for reading, only a few hundred feet away in the same mall.
As I said, the store doesn't officially open until this coming weekend, and some things are a little rough around the edges. At the moment, English-language titles only fill two shelves, the rest of the cafe's selection being in Japanese, so it's really a place for people who want to check out untranslated series. And maybe that's all right, because even if they expanded their English-language selection, could they reasonably attempt to compete with Borders, San Francisco's Best Unofficial English-language Manga Cafe, where you can grab a copy of The Last Uniform off the shelf (never mind why, this isn't about me), walk to the cafe area, sit down, drink a mocha latte, and return the book to the shelf after you're done without the bored store clerks even batting an eye? (For actual manga-BUYING, on the other hand, I'd recommend Comic Relief...) Another question is food and drink, whether you can buy it there and whether you can bring it in from outside, which was unresolved when I talked to the store clerks. Lastly, there is the hourly price (I'd prefer a flat fee supplemented by expensive drinks, rather than having to look at the clock when I should be looking at people getting blown away in Gantz), and the little gaps in their collection that may inevitably appear and need to be smoothed over (where's that yaoi section, people?).
But the chairs were comfortable, the location is perfect (if you live in San Francisco), and I'm already dreaming of all the weird and wonderful tankobon just waiting to be read in my own home city, like finding a library with a copy of the Necronomicon. Rather than "Will I go to this manga cafe," the question may be "Will I ever LEAVE this manga cafe?" Good question...
Thanks to Deb Aoki who told me about the news I had missed while I was overseas, I was lucky enough to attend the pre-opening weekend of Manga Cafe Mika, the first Japanese manga cafe in San Francisco. There's one other Japanese manga cafe in New York city, Manga Cafe Atom, and there's a few Korean and Chinese manga cafes scattered here and there from what I hear, but Mika is one of a very, very small number of pioneers ploughing this hopefully fertile ground.
Located in San Francisco's Japantown, Cafe Mika wasn't fully ready for business when I went in on May 26 -- the Internet computers weren't set up and there was just one pot of coffee chugging away -- but it was thrilling to set foot inside it and browse. According to the owners, a lot of the cafe's manga stock came from a manga cafe in Okinawa, so there were tons of tankobon of mysterious older manga -- shojo, shonen, seinen and josei from the '70s and 80s -- to please my retro-manga tastes. There were also shelves of more recent popular titles -- in the photos you can see a nice set of Emma, the Welcome to the NHK and Haruhi Suzumiya manga, and more. They've also got a good selection of recent shojo, shonen and other popular series -- the Shonen Jump lineup and so forth. But listing specific titles is just going to leave people asking "But do they have -----?" and I can only answer, "Probably." It's a small cafe, but they have a good selection. As someone who's fruitlessly tried to convince Kinokuniya staff to let me read their manga for free, a huge smile spread on my face to see those very same tankobon without shrinkwrap, delectably available for reading, only a few hundred feet away in the same mall.
As I said, the store doesn't officially open until this coming weekend, and some things are a little rough around the edges. At the moment, English-language titles only fill two shelves, the rest of the cafe's selection being in Japanese, so it's really a place for people who want to check out untranslated series. And maybe that's all right, because even if they expanded their English-language selection, could they reasonably attempt to compete with Borders, San Francisco's Best Unofficial English-language Manga Cafe, where you can grab a copy of The Last Uniform off the shelf (never mind why, this isn't about me), walk to the cafe area, sit down, drink a mocha latte, and return the book to the shelf after you're done without the bored store clerks even batting an eye? (For actual manga-BUYING, on the other hand, I'd recommend Comic Relief...) Another question is food and drink, whether you can buy it there and whether you can bring it in from outside, which was unresolved when I talked to the store clerks. Lastly, there is the hourly price (I'd prefer a flat fee supplemented by expensive drinks, rather than having to look at the clock when I should be looking at people getting blown away in Gantz), and the little gaps in their collection that may inevitably appear and need to be smoothed over (where's that yaoi section, people?).
But the chairs were comfortable, the location is perfect (if you live in San Francisco), and I'm already dreaming of all the weird and wonderful tankobon just waiting to be read in my own home city, like finding a library with a copy of the Necronomicon. Rather than "Will I go to this manga cafe," the question may be "Will I ever LEAVE this manga cafe?" Good question...
