At first glance, it's a supermarket like any other.
Apart from perhaps its orange and green colors, which are more garish than our gray signs, you will find what you are looking for: strawberry milk, fried sausages planted on a stick, triangles of rice stuffed and surrounded by a leaf of seaweed… But it is much more than a refrigerated store, open 7 days a week, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
To discover
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“The konbini is part of Japanese culture in the same way as temples, shrines or other night canteens. »
Jérôme Schmidt tells us about the tiny lives that constitute this Japanese microcosm in a charming little book.
First, it reminds us that the konbini is not a Japanese creation but an American one.
It was in the golden years of the post-war period that the supermarket was exported to the land of the Rising Sun.
From then on, this impersonal space became at the same time a refuge, a social place
“frequented several times a day, from the schoolboy in uniform to the hunched retiree”
… even the yakuza!
When one of his friends meets him in Tokyo, Schmidt acts as a guide.
And here we are, struggling like a third comrade alongside them.
We take the icy roads of the island of Hokkaido, we fly over Fukushima, we discover the hills of Nagasaki and we wear a floral shirt in Okinawa, where the konbini disappears in favor of “made in
America”
brands , with its rows of McDonald's and Burger King.
Schmidt's eyes are everywhere, even when the earth is rumbling.
It takes us into a whirlwind of lives.
Fascinating.
La Vie Konbini, by Jérôme Schmidt, Les Arènes, 136 p., €15.