WSJ bloggy section wrote:Early RisingExpatsAmericans Struggle With Tokyo’s Timetable
TOKYO–I figured things would be hard when I moved to Tokyo almost four years ago – finding new friends, paying for life in a big city. But the biggest challenge proved to be completely unexpected: dealing with the fact that the people and stores in this great city don’t function early. I’m a morning person; Tokyo is not a morning city.
The gym near my house doesn’t open until 7 a.m. on weekdays and 9 a.m. on weekends. Dry cleaners don’t open their doors until 10 a.m., and the closest supermarket: 9:30 a.m. (Back in Washington, D.C., the closest supermarket was open 24 hours a day.) Forget about doing anything productive before coming into the office.
Even a cup of coffee in a cafe is hard to come by early. The average weekday open time for the nearly 300 Starbucks stores in the Tokyo metropolitan area is a little before 7:30 a.m., according to my calculations and data on the Starbucks website. In Washington, where I lived before Tokyo, the average open time is 5:30 a.m. (Starbucks did not respond to requests for comment.) To be sure, convenience stores are ubiquitous in Tokyo, and most serve hot coffee 24 hours a day. The coffee there isn’t bad, but there’s often no place to sit down and relax.
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