On Monday this week I went to “Our living room café”. The café is in Chofu which is around 1 hour from my home if you don’t get lost on the mind boggling journey. My dad and i had to change trains 3 times and 2 of those times had to walk quite far between stations.
“Our living room café” is run by a 16-year old boy called Daisuke. He welcomes people to his café in his living room where he serves hot drinks for free. You can relax there and chat with him. There are books and games too.
When I arrived Daisuke said he had been finishing his assignments for a big test for the online high-school he goes to. The online school happened to be the same one I’m planning to join in April. He showed me the website and the Slack groups for the school. He was very helpful and good at explaining how the school works and he said he will tell me anything I ask him when I join it.
I think he has run the café for over 2 years. For 1 year of that he ran his café in an empty house because he thought that empty houses shouldn’t be wasted when they could be turned in to something useful. He wanted to make a place with a welcoming atmosphere for people to make friends and get to know each other. And in December after a few months break he started his café again in his own home.
I stayed there for around 2 hours and after about 1 hour a Japanese man came. It seemed like he had come there often. He was very interesting and friendly. He didn’t speak much English but Daisuke worked very hard translating from English to Japanese and vice versa for us.
It was nice to sit there and talk about many things with friendly people. I would like to go again soon. Maybe next time we will play a board game as they have a lot of them at the café.
The café is open three times a week:
Mondays 14:00 to 18:00
Tuesdays 14:00 to 18:00
Fridays 14:00 to 18:00
You don’t need to make a reservation, you can just turn up but it’s important to check on X(Formally Twitter) to see if the times have been changed: https://twitter.com/livingroomchofu
This is their website(currently only in Japanese): ourlivingroomcafe.mystrikingly.com
Daisuke’s sister Sara, helps with the café but she wasn’t there when I went. She runs a weekly book swap and you can find her X(Formally Twitter) page here: https://twitter.com/BookSwapChofu