Kyle's World

One thing I've noticed from living here in Japan for two years is that the Japanese love their coffee black. Just black is fine, as is black with sugar, but very rarely do any Japanese seem to put milk or creamer in their milk. I thought it could just be my co-workers, who are obviously all teachers; you know how it gets with the teachers lifestyle, long hours of marking, endless meetings with the occasional late-hour drinking party mixed in- it's no wonder the Japanese teachers would need strong, black coffee. But my theory might be lost. If you walk into any ordinary konbini, the rows and rows of canned coffee they sell are usually black, and other variants of dark. If you are lucky enough to find a can of coffee with milk (assuming you were able to read the label) then you'd also find an insane amount of sugar inside. It would be appropriate for me to ask the konbini staff if they sold sugar with coffee in it. Since I absolutely need milk in my coffee, I often struggle to get a good cup here. There's usually freshly made coffee at my school, but there's never any milk. Sometimes if there's extra milk cartons left over from school lunch, they will appear in the fridge ready to be consumed in my coffee. But that's asuming I remember to hide it. If I don't hide the milk, it'll get taken and drunken by another teacher. Or I can remember to bring my own milk from home, but that also doesn't happen so often. What a man has to endure to get the perfect tasting cup of coffee...