The Sunday Times April 24, 2022 13WORLD NEWS
Deadline looming? This writers’ café won’t let you leave till you’re done
the most populous city in the
world, it is a tiny oasis and the
symbol of the great struggles
of modern urban dwellers
against the demons of noise,
distraction and deadlines.
“We don’t have food or
fancy roast beans,” says
Takuya Kawai, the café’s
proprietor, who hovers in the
background overlooking the
scene. “The service we
provide is concentration.
This is a place for people who
are really up against it.” With
this article to write, and time
slipping away, I fit in
perfectly.
The café’s mission is spelt
out in a stern manifesto
displayed in its window:
“This is a café exclusively for
those who are writing.”
According to Rule One,
customers must state at the
outset the nature of their
writing project, the number
of words required and the
deadline. In my case, this
would be: article about
anxiously writing to deadline;
900 words; 6pm. Rule Three
is perhaps the most striking:to chivvy his customers along
are tactful, rather than
impatient. “How much have
you written?” he asks, as he
proffers a chocolate biscuit.
“That’s good — please
persevere!” But knowing that
he is watching quells any urge
to waste time on a
smartphone or indulge in a
round of Wordle.
Finally, I finish. When a
customer completes a
project, Kawai marks the
occasion by ringing a bell, a
custom inspired by the close
of trading on the New York
stock exchange. Everyone
else in the café claps and calls
out “otsukaresama deshita”,
the Japanese phrase that
translates literally as “you
must be exhausted” but
means “well done”.
“The film that inspired to
create this café is Field of
Dreams,” Kawai says. “The
guy in that story has a
baseball stadium, and I have
set up this space.”
Like a Japanese Kevin
Costner he built it, and they
have come.It’s late afternoon in the
suburbs of Tokyo, and in the
narrow confines of the
Manuscript Writing Café the
tension is rising. At the bar, a
woman named Mayumi is
finishing off an article about
songwriting. At the back,
Ayasuke is working on latest
instalment of his fantasy
graphic novel sequence. And
at the window there is me,
racing to meet my deadline
for The Sunday Times.
We sit at narrow counters,
separated by plastic Covid
screens. None of us speaks or
even looks at our fellow
customers. There are toffees
and tea bags on the bar, but
they are little more than an
afterthought. The Manuscript
Writing Café is unusual in
various ways, not least
because the last thing you
come for is the coffee.
From outside, it looks like
nothing very much — another
small business on a car-
choked intersection in the
suburb of Koenji. But here, inRichard Lloyd Parry Tokyocafé’s owner,
Richard Lloyd
Parry hammers
out this articlethere and pointed out that, despite her
insisting “we have been to the border”,
she actually hadn’t. Her response went
viral. Giving the trademark laugh her crit-
ics call the “Kamala cackle”, something
she cannot control in moments of ten-
sion, she said: “And I haven’t been to
Europe. And I mean, I don’t understand
the point that you’re making. I’m not dis-
counting the importance of the border.”
A couple of weeks later, Harris made a
brief visit to a crossing at El Paso en route
to California, where she frequently
spends weekends. She has made one visit
to Honduras and none to El Salvador.
This week her office issued a progress
report on her Strategy for Addressing the
Root Causes of Migration in Central
America, which got absolutely no atten-
tion because she did nothing to promote
it, even though it claimed to have raised
“over $1.2 billion [£934 million] in private
sector commitments” for the Northern
Triangle countries. Meanwhile, the US
recorded the highest monthly number of
arrests at the border for two decades in
March, and Biden’s abolition next month
of a pandemic restriction on the border is
likely to encourage even more crossings.
Harris’s weird answer to Holt put her
critics on high alert for other verbal slips
— in March, in a speech in Sunset, Louisi-
ana, about broadband, she reflected:
“The governor and I and we were all
doing a tour of the library here and talk-
ing about the significance of the passage
of time, right? So when you think about it,
there is great significance to the passage
of time in terms of what we need to do to
lay these wires... to create these jobs.
And there is such great significance to the
passage of time when we think about a
day in the life of our children and what
that means to the future of our nation.”Since then her main media interview
has been about Wordle.
Out there in the country, in the fly-over
states that national politicians ignore at
their peril, it sometimes feels as if Harris
has all but disappeared. “She’s just not on
the radar screen,” said Dave Nagle, 79, a
lawyer and former congressman in Iowa.
“There hasn’t been anything that she
could claim as an accomplishment or
achievement, anything that translates
into a plus for the administration. A lot of
the assignments she’s taken get a half a
paragraph one day, and then they disap-
pear from the political landscape.
“I don’t think she’s done anything that
would disqualify her from remaining on
the ticket. But when she steps outside the
Biden shadow, she doesn’t reach the sun-
light.” As for her ranking among the 49
previous VPs: “She’s in the lower third of
them. She’s in the middle at best.”
Objective observers are no more for-
giving in her home state. Since Gavin
Newsom, the 54-year-old California gov-
ernor, convincingly won a recall election
in September, there has been talk that he
could launch his own White House run.
“Kamala Harris is obviously the most
likely Californian to make it to the White
House, but only because she’s VP and
would succeed Biden if he were to leave
office before his term expires in 2024,”
said George Skelton, a veteran political
columnist for the Los Angeles Times. “If
Biden didn’t run for re-election, she’d
probably run and fail.” The Washington
Post has just moved Buttigieg into pole
position ahead of her in its monthly rank-
ing of the Democratic field.
Bob Shrum, a veteran Democratic
Party consultant in California, begged to
differ on her fortunes. “We’re living in an
abnormal time. The mood in the country
is very sour, because of weariness with
Covid, supply-chain-driven inflation. I
would argue [none of it is] Joe Biden’s
fault, it’s not Kamala Harris’s fault. The
ratings reflect the fact that people are
frustrated. It may be true that the Demo-
crats will get in trouble in the mid-term
[elections in November] but this hap-
pened with Obama and Biden in 2010 and
then they got re-elected in 2012. Some of
her speeches are excellent, but breaking
through the miasma of frustration in the
country is very hard right now.”
Harris’s performance has drawn inevi-
table comparisons with Biden’s own stint
as VP (and to be fair, no one ever thought
he’d be president either).
“A lot of vice-presidents... weren’t
necessarily the highest-profile and often
suffered from being second fiddle to the
president,” said Julian Zelizer, professor
of political history at Princeton Univer-
sity. “You can overcome that. The real
question is, behind the scenes, is she an
asset to the administration?”
Harris’s office say she has embarked
on a softly-softly campaign to sell the big
legislative success of the first year, the
$1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment
and Jobs Act, by visiting out-of-the way
places like Sunset and Greenville, Missis-If Biden
didn’t run
again, she
would
probably
run and failALOOF
DRI FT
BOTCH
GONER
The vanishing
Veep
ILLUSTRATION: JAMES COWENsippi. “It’s not necessarily that we’re
going to win Mississippi, but it makes a
difference in people knowing that they’re
seen and they’re heard,” said a senior
White House adviser.
Zelizer sees Harris as a victim of too
much hype. “There were very high
expectations for a position where there’s
real limits on what you can do,” he said.
“Added to that were all the murmurs that
she was getting ready for being the next
president. Failure to meet those kind of
expectations is almost inevitable.”“Until you finish you can’t
leave.”
As if this were not enough
pressure, there is Rule Two:
“Once an hour, the proprietor
will ask you about your
progress.” Kawai has already
checked up on a couple of
customers and I know that
my turn will come.
The café opened its doors
only this month, but it clearly
meets a deep need, and
already it has been featured
on many national television
channels, newspapers, blogs
and news websites — four
Japanese journalists have
passed through as I write.
Kawai, a journalist and
film-maker, set it up after his
previous business, a small
video studio, foundered
because of the pandemic.
He identified a
demographic not catered for
by other businesses — people
unable, or unwilling, either to
work from home or to go to
an office. As 30 years of
relative economic stagnation
have reduced the ranks of the
salaryman in his secure job-With few
distractions and
regular spot
checks by thefor-life, a new generation has
been born of what Japanese
call “freeters” — jobbing
freelancers living lives of
insecure freedom in the gig
economy.
The Japanese are great
coffee drinkers and in little
cafés, as well as big chains
such as Starbucks, the tables
and counters are crowded
with freeters and their
laptops. But an unwritten
convention makes it
unacceptable to stay sitting
down in front of a screen for
more than two hours.
“After a while it’s awkward
sitting for ages in a café, and
they can be noisy,” says
Mayumi Kon, a music teacher
who is in the Manuscript
Writing Café working on a
blog article about love songs.
“But at home there are
distractions, and at the office
you have to deal with a boss
and colleagues. Here I can
stay until I finish, and no one
bothers me.”
Ayasuke Nakanomura is
writing the latest instalment
of a manga comic seriesentitled Reincarnated Life of
the Vicious Empress. For him,
the café is an escape from his
10 sq ft bedroom in his
parents’ home.
“My desk is there, and my
bed is right next to it, so I
often end up lying down and
going to sleep,” he says. “Here
there’s something about the
fact that everyone else is
working around you. It’s a
totally different level of
concentration.”
After early scepticism, I am
beginning to see what he
means. Even for a reporter,
deadlines are never easy, but
the Manuscript Writing Café
eases the burden. The chair is
neither too hard nor too
comfortable; the plinth for
my laptop elevates the
keyboard to the perfect angle.
The wifi is fast, and the price
— 150 yen (91p) an hour — can
barely cover the cost of the
boiled sweets.
With deadline looming, I
am entering the final straight.
The hectoring phone call
from the editor could come at
any moment. Kawai’s effortsShe’s just
not on
the radar
screenKamala Harris has been near-invisible as Joe Biden’s
deputy. To land the top job, she’ll need to prove she
can solve more than Wordle, writes David CharterT
he pressures of the US presi-
dency finally become too much
for Joe Biden. After suffering a
health crisis and deciding that
he can no longer continue as
leader of the free world, there is
only one thing for it. President
Kamala Harris is sworn in at a
hastily arranged ceremony.
That is the scenario playing out six
nights a week at the Old Vic in London in
Mike Bartlett’s play The 47th, which has
drawn attention for its lively portrayal of
an out-of-control Donald Trump but also
includes a prediction of how the Oval
Office gets its first female occupant.
And perhaps it is now the only way that
Harris could become the 47th president
of the United States.
Fourteen months into the Biden
administration and a year after she was
given the task of tackling rampant migra-
tion at the Mexico border, Harris, 57,
appears to have shrunk, rather than
grown, in her role. Her ratings are worse
than those of her boss — even in her home
state of California she is at just 35 per cent
approval, according to the UC Berkeley
Institute of Governmental Studies (Biden
is on 50 per cent in California and in the
low 40s nationally).
The fanfare that greeted the first
woman, and the first person of black and
south Asian descent, to occupy the East
Wing was perhaps too great, the chal-
lenge of shining without annoying Biden
— or his people — too tricky to pull off.
It all started so positively for Harris —
glass ceilings shattered, gushing media
profiles, a cover shoot for Vogue — but
the negative stories soon took over. Har-
ris complained that Vogue used a
photo of her dressed too casually in
trainers and skinny jeans. It didn’t
make her appear serious, she
grumbled.
While her staff have care-
fully limited her media appear-
ances since then, she gave a
very long interview this week
to the pop culture website the
Ringer about her obsession
with Wordle, the five-letter
word game, delving deeply
into her technique (starting
with ‘n-o-t-e-s’). She was on a
48-game winning streak. Her hus-
band Doug was hooked too. On
and on it went. “So we will say,
‘How many tries did it take you
today?’ ‘How many tries did it
take you?’ ‘Did you get it?’ ‘Did
you get it?’ Oh yeah, we are defi-
nitely checking in every day about
Wordle.” Serious?
One rather obvious sign that all is
not well has been the damaging leaks
that have beset Harris, exposing dis-content in her camp and irritating the
president’s. Her office has also suffered
from a prodigious turnover of personnel,
capped this week by the announcement
that her chief of staff, Tina Flournoy, is to
depart.
While Biden is behaving as if he will
run again in 2024, there are serious
doubts inside the Democratic Party
about whether he has the stamina for a
campaign unrestricted by Covid-19.
The Harris camp suspects supporters
of 40-year-old Pete Buttigieg, the US
transportation secretary, were behind
some of the leaks. “Some people are try-
ing to discredit her for their own political
benefit,” said one Democratic operative
who did not want to be named because of
the atmosphere of recrimination inside
the party. “If Biden doesn’t run again,
[Buttigieg’s] biggest concern is Harris.”
This — and other Harris problems — are
laid bare in a forthcoming book, This Will
Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for
America’s Future, by two New York Times
journalists, Jonathan Martin and Alexan-
der Burns. “Some of Harris’s advisers
believed the president’s almost entirely
white inner circle did not show the vice-
president the respect she deserved,” they
wrote, in excerpts obtained by Politico
ahead of publication next month. Flour-
noy was sent to tell Biden’s staffers that
they ought to stand up when she entered
the room, as they did for the president.
According to the book, Harris wanted
an international role — but not the
dreaded Mexican border. “Her staff
floated the possibility of the vice-presi-
dent overseeing relations with the Nordic
countries — a low-risk diplomatic assign-
ment that might have helped Harris get
adjusted to the international stage in
welcoming venues like Oslo and
Copenhagen,” they wrote. This
was rejected and “privately
mocked” by the White House,
while her bid to make a
major foreign policy speech
was also vetoed.
When Biden announced
he was putting Harris in
charge of “stemming the
migrat ion to our southern border
[from] Mexico and the Northern Trian-
gle” of El Salvador, Guatemala and Hon-
duras, he noted that “I gave you a tough
job, and you’re smiling, but there’s no
one better capable of trying to organise
this for us”.
Her reluctance even to visit the Mex-
ico border in the following months —
she insisted her job was to tackle root
causes, not perform for the cameras at
the frontier like some of her vocal
Republican critics — overshadowed
her visit to Guatemala last summer.
Lester Holt of NBC interviewed hereKamala Harris
congratulating
Joe Biden on his
2020 election
win. Life has not
been easy as his
vice-president