A Place to Simply Be: Ibasho, Solitude, and Urban Belonging in Tokyo Cafés

Sammanfattning

This thesis examined how solitude is experienced and accommodated in cafés in contemporary Tokyo, and how it can constitute a form of urban belonging beyond community-centred understandings of public social life. While cafés are commonly analysed through Oldenburg’s third place theory, which emphasises sociability and informal social interactions, such frameworks cannot adequately account for the presence of people spending time alone in cafés. To address this gap, the thesis used third place and ibasho, a Japanese concept referring to a place where one feels ease and safety, and a sense of belonging understood as the individual’s subjective experience of these conditions. The study was based on participant observation conducted in three cafés in Tokyo, supplemented by semi-structured interviews and analysis of selected user reviews from Tabelog. The findings showed that cafés function as important urban infrastructures in a city where free public space and resting spaces are limited, sustaining urban life as third places between the pressures of home and work, and through ibasho, by providing places for individual ease and free from social demand. The thesis concluded that, due to the creation of conditions that people can subjectively claim as ibasho, cafés become places where solitude constitutes a genuine form of urban belonging.