In December 1926 the Taishō emperor died and the era was renamed Shōwa — from that year Japan entered the transition known as ‘Taishō Romance → Shōwa Modern.’ Tea houses in Tokyo’s Ginza copied Europe and renamed themselves ‘Café’; the three-in-one kafē culture of coffee + waitress + jazz arrived from the West, and local craftsmen made it their own.

Visually, this aesthetic is a rare ‘East-West hybrid’: it absorbs the circle-square-triangle of the Bauhaus and the radiant gold of Art Deco, but uses Japanese colour swatches (persimmon, blue-grey, matcha green), Japanese patterns (ichimatsu checks, seigaiha waves, yagasuri arrows) and vertical kanji set against horizontal katakana. The three kanji ‘純喫茶’ — a pure coffee house with no alcohol and no companions, selling only coffee — and their signboard lettering, are still the emblem of the whole style.

Defeat in 1945 froze the aesthetic for a generation; but after the 1990s, Shōwa nostalgia kept returning in waves — Tadanori Yokoo and Keiichi Tanaami fused it with psychedelic painting; from the 2010s the ‘retro junkissa’ tag on Threads and IG runs into the millions. Today Suntory’s Yamazaki packaging, the Bottega Veneta Kyoto store and a whole crop of Taipei retro cafés — all are smoking the same cigarette again.