Writers facing deadlines go to Tokyo’s Manuscript Writing Cafe with an understanding: They cannot leave until their work is done — and there is prodding thrown in to make sure they buckle down and finish.
The clean, well-lit place in western Tokyo has 10 seats reserved for writers, editors, manga artists and anybody else grappling with the written word and deadlines.
Coffee and tea are unlimited and self-serve, and high-speed Wi-Fi and docking ports are installed at every seat.
Photo: Reuters
Customers enter the cafe, write down their name, writing goals and the time they plan to finish.
They can also ask the staff for progress checks as they work, with “mild” just asking them if they have finished as they pay, “normal” being an hourly check-in and “hard” standing frequently behind them to give them silent pressure.
Owner Takuya Kawai, 52 and a writer himself, said he hoped that the strict rules would help people focus.
Photo: Reuters
“The cafe went viral on social media and people are saying the rules are scary or that it feels like being watched from behind,” Kawai said, displaying a board with the names of customers who completed their tasks and left.
“But actually instead of monitoring, I’m here to support them... As a result, what they thought would take a day actually was completed in three hours, or tasks that usually take three hours were done in one,” Kawai said.
The cafe charges ￥130 (US$1.02) for the first 30 minutes, and then ￥300 for each successive hour. Although a few people have stayed past the official closing time, they have all eventually gotten their work done.
Emiko Sasaki, 37 and a blog writer, said she relished the chance to be free of pesky social media and telephone calls.
“It’s good to be able to concentrate on writing,” she said, completing her goal of three blog articles in three hours.
The cafe, originally a livestreaming space, was hit badly by the COVID-19 pandemic, but Kawai is now hopeful as word of mouth spreads about its new format.
“I don’t know what kind of work might be born, but I’m proud to be able to offer my support so that things written here can be published to the whole world,” he said.
Through the noise of rushing papers and whirring belts at a print factory in Kyoto, two creators watch their photo essay come to life in broadsheet form — part of an effort to win new audiences in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). Despite the decline of the publishing industry, self-publication and handmade “zine” magazines are growing in popularity in Japan, reflecting the nation’s enduring love of paper in the digital era. While speaking to Agence France-Presse at the plant, his hands black with ink, one of the creators, Kazuma Obara, said: “I think [paper] is a medium that engages all five
‘ABSURD MISTAKE’: The election commission said that there had been a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations ran short of ballot papers South Korean riot police yesterday cleared protesters from a Seoul polling station after a 35-hour blockade sparked by a shortage of ballot papers during local elections earlier this week. Wednesday’s election was the first nationwide vote since South Korean President Lee Jae-myung took office following the ouster of Yoon Suk-yeol over his short-lived martial law declaration. Lee’s ruling Democratic Party swept most races, but failed to flip the crucial Seoul mayoral seat. The South Korean National Election Commission apologized, blaming a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations in Seoul ran short of ballot papers. Some polling stations stayed open until 10pm to
Australian researchers have trained lab-grown brain cells on a silicon computer chip to play the 1990s shooter game Doom and said they are just scratching the surface of what the neurons could be capable of doing. It is the science-fiction work of biotech boffins at Cortical Labs, who researched and developed the technology that harnesses the workings of the brain’s networking system. Each so-called “biological computer” contains about 200,000 living human brain cells, grown from stem cells that were harvested from blood donations. Having mastered the simple computer game Pong, where a paddle is moved up and down to send a ball
France experienced its hottest spring on record, the French weather service said on Tuesday, after an exceptional early heat wave that also broke highs for the season in England and Wales. Meteo-France said the average nationwide temperature over March to May was 13.8°C — about 1.7°C above the norm, and surpassing records set in 2011 and 2020. “The warmest spring since records began in 1900,” it said in a bulletin. All three months were warmer than average, but the onset of an “unprecedented heatwave” late last month pushed the mercury to highs typically seen at the height of the summer. “Our country had never
RSS