The Second Life of Coffee: Ethiopia Reimagined in Seoul and Tokyo

This presentation explores how Ethiopian coffee acquires a “second life” as it travels from its origin in Ethiopia to consumer spaces in East Asia. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Ethiopia, South Korea, and Japan, this study examines how the narratives, memories, and symbolisms of Ethiopian coffee are reshaped in new cultural and spatial contexts.
Whereas conventional coffee studies tend to separate production and consumption, this research focuses on the transitional zones—cafés, packaging, everyday consumer practices—where stories are translated, embellished, erased, or re-authored. What does “Ethiopia” come to mean when it appears on a café menu in Seoul or a specialty coffee shelf in Tokyo? How is Ethiopia imagined, commodified, or misrecognized through language, branding, and taste?
To understand these shifts, I propose a framework of coffee geography—an emerging cultural geographic approach that traces how coffee travels as both a material and symbolic agent across transregional circuits. This framework blends spatial analysis, storytelling, and sensory ethnography to analyze how origin, identity, and desire are reconfigured through coffee.
Ultimately, this research positions coffee not merely as a beverage, but as a carrier of meaning, memory, and power—linking Africa and Asia in unexpected ways. It seeks to establish coffee geography as a tool to rethink cultural circulation through everyday commodities.