Café Paulista

Café Paulista (カフェーパウリスタ) is a Japanese coffee company and Ginza coffee house whose whole existence began as a piece of Brazilian trade promotion. Paulista is the Portuguese word for someone from São Paulo state, and that is the point: the business was created to hand out coffee that the São Paulo state government supplied to Japan free of charge, in order to build a Japanese habit of drinking it.¹

The company was set up in 1910, and the Ginza shop opened on 12 December 1911.² That shop, in its revived form, is the oldest Japanese coffee house still operating — the anchor entry on this wiki’s Kissaten note.

It is not a competition roaster and never has been. There are no auction lots, cupping scores or farm sheets attached to the name (see what this wiki does not have below). Its importance is historical: Café Paulista is a large part of why coffee arrived in ordinary Japanese life as a Brazilian drink.

The basics

Attribute	Detail
Company founded	1910 (Meiji 43), as the limited partnership 合資会社カフェーパウリスタ; incorporated as a 株式会社 in 19132
Ginza shop opened	12 December 1911 (Meiji 44)2 — the homepage dates the business to 明治四十四年, i.e. the shop year3
Founder	Mizuno Ryō (水野龍), head of an emigration company21
Political backing	Ōkuma Shigenobu and other politicians21
Ginza address	Nagasaki Center Building 1F, 8-9 Ginza, Chuo-ku, Tokyo 104-006134
Ginza shop reopened	1970, at the current Ginza 8-chōme location1
Flagship product	森のコーヒー (“Mori no Coffee”), listed as the shop’s number-one seller3

The two founding years are not a contradiction, just two different things being dated. 1910 is when the company and the Brazilian supply contract were signed; 1911 is when the Ginza doors opened, and that is the year the company puts on its own shopfront and homepage.³²

Free coffee, and why Brazil gave it away

The arrangement behind the company is the unusual part. In 1910 Mizuno Ryō obtained from the São Paulo state government a continuing supply of Santos coffee beans plus exclusive promotion and sales rights for “the Orient” (東洋における一手宣伝販売権).² The supply was 1,000 bales a year at no cost, and it ran for twelve years, ending in 1923.²¹

Brazil’s motive was not charity and Japan’s was not either. Mizuno ran a company organising Japanese emigration to Brazil, and the coffee was granted in recognition of that work — the beans were, in the company’s own framing, the product of Japanese immigrant labour on Brazilian farms. Building Japanese demand for Brazilian coffee was therefore also a way of supporting the emigrants growing it.² São Paulo, for its part, had far more coffee than the world was buying and a direct interest in opening a new market. See Brazil for the scale of that oversupply problem and History of coffee for the wider pattern.

The practical result was cheap coffee served in quantity to Japanese students, writers and clerks in the 1910s, at a moment when almost nobody in Japan had a coffee habit.

1923: the year the model broke

1923 ended two things at once. The free-coffee contract reached its twelve-year expiry, and the Great Kantō Earthquake destroyed most of the company’s branches.²¹ Café Paulista withdrew from running coffee shops and turned toward roasting and wholesale (焙煎卸業) — importing green coffee and supplying it to others rather than pouring cups itself.²¹

The name changed too. Under a wartime government directive the company was renamed Nittō Coffee Co., Ltd. (日東珈琲) in 1943, and only later returned to trading as Café Paulista.¹

The Ginza coffee house came back in 1970, opened by a subsidiary at the present Ginza 8-chōme address, rebuilt to recall the original room and its tableware.¹ Japanese Wikipedia records that John Lennon and Yoko Ono visited that revived shop in 1978.¹

The “Japan’s first café” question

The revived Ginza shop markets itself as Japan’s first café. Japanese coffee history does not agree: 可否茶館 (Kahi Chakan), which opened in Ueno in April 1888 and closed around 1893, is generally treated as the country’s first café, and Japanese Wikipedia says so explicitly on Paulista’s own page.¹

This wiki takes the same line — see Kissaten, where Kahi Chakan is the 1888 origin point and Café Paulista is the oldest one still trading. Those are different claims, and only the second one holds up.

To verify — the 23-shop chain claim

One secondary article states that Mizuno Ryō opened 23 cafés across Japan and Shanghai, making Café Paulista an early multi-shop coffee chain.⁵ The number appears nowhere in the company’s own history pages,² and no second independent source for it was found. The existence of multiple branches is solid — the company’s own account of 1923 describes branches being destroyed²¹ — but treat 23 as one writer’s figure, not an established count.

To verify — opening hours, prices and smoking policy all disagree

Three sources give three different sets of hours. The official homepage says 9:00–18:00, Monday to Friday.³ A Japan travel directory lists 9:00–20:00 weekdays and Saturdays (food last order 19:00) and 11:30–19:00 Sundays and holidays, with a per-person budget of ¥1,000–2,000.⁴ A Tokyo history blog gives 8:30–21:30 Monday to Saturday and 11:30–20:00 Sundays and holidays, quotes a drink called “Cafe Florestal” at ¥650, and describes a smoking policy of 1F smoking, 2F non-smoking, both non-smoking at weekends.⁵ The spread almost certainly reflects changes over time, and Japan’s 2020 indoor-smoking rules make the smoking description likely obsolete. Use the official site, or the sign on the door.

To verify — the organic claim on 森のコーヒー

A Japanese coffee blog presents the shop’s flagship 森のコーヒー as organically grown (有機栽培).⁶ The official homepage promotes the same product as its number-one seller and describes fully-ripened beans (こだわりの完熟豆使用) but makes no organic-certification statement on the page read here.³ No certifying body, certificate number or origin farm was found. Treat “organic” as an unverified blog description.

Gran Café Paulista — the other Paulista

Gran Café Paulista is a Lavazza product, not a Japanese one, and the two are easy to confuse because both take their name from São Paulo.

Lavazza’s own pages state that Gran Café Paulista was born in 1961 in Turin, out of a collaboration between Lavazza and the Brasileiro do Café Institute — the Brazilian federal coffee agency, the Instituto Brasileiro do Café, which set Brazil’s national coffee policy from 1952 until it was abolished in 1990.⁷ Lavazza describes it as “the famous Italian coffee dedicated to baristas” and “the first Lavazza mono-origin of fine Brazilian Arabica”, and calls the modern version a premium coffee with Rainforest Alliance certification, made from 100% natural Arabica from Brazil.⁸⁷ The owner is Luigi Lavazza S.p.A., Via Bologna 32, Turin.⁸

“Mono-origin” here means single-country, not single-farm. Lavazza publishes no altitude, no farm name, no lot structure and no cupping score for it, and “natural” is used in the dried-in-the-fruit sense typical of Brazilian export coffee.

To verify — whether the two Paulistas are connected, and who owns the Japanese one now

No source consulted links Gran Café Paulista to the Japanese Café Paulista. Both names derive independently from São Paulo, and both businesses were built on Brazilian institutional coffee promotion, which is enough to explain the coincidence without a corporate relationship — but the absence of a stated connection is not proof there is none, and neither company mentions the other. Separately, the modern corporate structure of the Japanese company is unclear: the historical form (合資会社, then 株式会社 from 1913) is documented,² and the operating entity today is referred to as Paulista Co., Ltd. (ポウリスタ株式会社), but no shareholding, group structure or shop-management detail was found on any official page.

What this wiki does not have on it

Stated plainly, because the absence is itself the finding. No Cup of Excellence, Best of Panama or other green coffee auction lot, no World Coffee Championships result, and no published cupping score was found for Café Paulista under either name. No farm names, altitudes or processing details are published for its current beans — the official site names individual offerings such as a Brazilian Geisha, but no producer-level data behind them.³ Any claim that Café Paulista coffee clears a specialty threshold such as 85 points is unsupported by anything published.

That is a description of the business rather than a gap in the reporting. Café Paulista’s claim on coffee history was made in 1910–1923, in a market that had no specialty grading to be measured against.

Related

• Kissaten — the Japanese coffee house tradition, where Paulista is the oldest still trading
• Café de l’Ambre — the other historic Ginza coffee room documented here
• Japan coffee market — the market Paulista helped create, and Brazil’s place as its anchor supplier
• Brazil — the origin the whole enterprise was built to sell
• History of coffee — the wider era of state-backed coffee promotion
• Doutor Coffee · UCC Ueshima Coffee · Maruyama Coffee — the other Japanese coffee companies documented here
• Instituto Brasileiro do Café · Rainforest Alliance · Natural process — the Gran Café Paulista side
• Nel drip · Siphon brewing · Coffee roasting

Official links

• Official site — Café Paulista (銀座カフェーパウリスタ)
• Official site — Gran Café Paulista (Lavazza)

Footnotes

1. カフェーパウリスタ — Wikipedia (ja) — confirmed via fetch: paulista as “person from São Paulo”, Mizuno Ryō as an emigration-company head backed by Ōkuma Shigenobu, the December 1911 Ginza opening as the São Paulo state government’s exclusive coffee sales office, the 1923 earthquake and contract expiry ending café operations, the 1943 renaming to 日東珈琲, the 1970 revival in Ginza 8-chōme, the 1978 John Lennon and Yoko Ono visit, and Kahi Chakan (1888) as generally considered Japan’s first café ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹²

2. Café Paulista — company history and brands page (ブランド紹介) — confirmed via fetch: the 1910 São Paulo state government contract for continuous Santos supply and 東洋における一手宣伝販売権, the 合資会社 founding and 1913 incorporation, Ōkuma Shigenobu’s backing, the 12 December 1911 Ginza opening, 1,000 bales a year free for twelve years ending 1923, and the shift to 焙煎卸業 ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴

3. Café Paulista — official site (銀座カフェーパウリスタ) — confirmed via fetch: 創業明治四十四年 (1911), the 銀座8-9 長崎センタービル1F address, hours of 9:00–18:00 Monday–Friday, 森のコーヒー as the number-one seller with 完熟豆 and no organic claim, and a Brazilian Geisha among current offerings ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

4. Ginza Café Paulista — Japan travel directory listing — source of the alternative 9:00–20:00 / 11:30–19:00 hours and the ¥1,000–2,000 budget ↩ ↩²

5. Café Paulista: Oldest cafe in Tokyo with a Brazilian history — Exploring Old Tokyo — sole source for the 23-café claim, the ¥650 Cafe Florestal price, the 8:30–21:30 hours and the floor-by-floor smoking policy ↩ ↩²

6. 銀座カフェーパウリスタ『森のコーヒー』 — cafe-obrigado — sole source for the 有機栽培 (organic) description of 森のコーヒー ↩

7. Lavazza UK — Gran Café Paulista collection — confirmed via fetch: “born in 1961 in Turin from the collaboration between Lavazza and the Brasileiro do Café Institute”, “the famous Italian coffee dedicated to baristas”, “the first Lavazza mono-origin of fine Brazilian Arabica” ↩ ↩²

8. Lavazza — Gran Café Paulista — confirmed via fetch: “born in 1961, the legend of Italian single-origin coffee”, 100% natural Arabica from Brazil, Rainforest Alliance certification, and Luigi Lavazza S.p.A., Via Bologna 32, Turin ↩ ↩²