I was waiting on the article to be posted in Japan Times before posting this, but have realized that every single one of their articles is paywalled. So we won’t wait.
Goddess and I, along with our German friends, took the train across town to visit “The Café of Mistaken Orders,” which I learned about a few months back while planning this trip.
The cafe has an amazing mission – to give local women who have dementia a chance to interact with the public. These women handle the food prep and serving, while the handlers make sure that the environment is safe and nurturing.
An all-volunteer organization, handlers and staff alike, the cafe opens for just a couple of hours midday on the second Wednesday of the month.
As foreigners, we had concerns about how the interaction would go, unsure if our speaking foreign languages and being barely functional in Japanese would go. Quickly we learned that it was a misplaced concern.
We arrived about 15 minutes early and were quickly ushered in by one of the handlers, who spoke English quite well. Soon after we sat down, another diner introduced herself, an American staff writer for The Japan Times, who was writing an interest story on the cafe.
We were going for lunch, but realized shortly before we got there that it would be just a midday kaffee und kuchen (a nod to our German friends), coffee and cake. But that suited everyone well.
If you can’t zoom in to the green block lower right of the above pic, it says “Some staff members with dementia are not fully aware of their condition,” then goes on to ask us not to refer to the condition or ask them questions about it.
That’s where the language barrier helped.
Not that there was much of a language barrier. Our lovely server’s command of the English language was on par with our Japanese.
Toddler-level. But with pointing and a lot of bowing of the heads, we were able to convey our orders.
Here’s where “the Mistaken Orders” come in. With a wait staff and a kitchen staff having varying levels of dementia, there’s a risk of orders getting mixed up.
That’s part of the charm.
But there were no mistaken orders in our foursome.
All-in-all, a pretty humbling experience.
In the last week or so, they have announced a campaign to raise funds to open their own dedicated restaurant instead of relying on the generosity of restaurants to provide space (and probably goods).
If that’s something that you are interested in supporting, I’m sure that a quick search will lead you to them.
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