Germany's little Japan

A Buddhist temple, sushi shops, green tea, mochi and bean paste sweets, the smell of incense and young women dressed like manga characters and J-pop stars. No, this isn't Kyoto or Osaka, it's Düsseldorf in Germany..

Düsseldorf, the capital of the German state Nordrhein-Westfalen is very well known in Japan. This is not because of a spectacular landmark, an opera house or a certain delicatessen. Nowhere in Germany are there more Japanese residents and Japanese businesses. It is the third largest settlement of Japanese businesses in Europe.

Today Düsseldorf is also known as Little Tokyo on the Rhine. More than 470 companies are now located here, and have brought more than 6,000 Japanese residents. They can now choose between 27 Japanese restaurants, which even cover certain local specialties. The restaurant Naniwa, for example, specializes in ramen-noodles. The community includes a Japanese weekly newspaper, a monthly magazine, karaoke bars, two aikido dojo, a golf club and a Japanese school. It is therefore not surprising that many former citizens of Düsseldorf call it their second home.

The nucleus of the Japanese community is Immermannstrasse. It's a wide shopping street in the city's center. Many Japanese companies have their offices here and restaurants, bakeries, supermarkets, language schools, travel agencies, bookstores, arts and crafts shops and other shops related to the Japanese community can also be found here. Most of the shops display their advertisement using Japanese characters. The signs in one travel agency are entirely in Japanese and the clerk doesn't speak a word of German.

"I have many Japanese customers," says the waiter of a Spanish-style cafe and tapas bar on Immermannstrasse. "Some seem to work for Japanese restaurants and come here during their break or before work. They wear their typical work outfits with wide pants. If one of the shops or restaurants has promotion you even can see young women wearing kimono."

The display in the Japanese deli Maruyasu next door to the Spanish tapas bar offers bento boxes as well as instant noodles, soups, yakiniku and sushi. "Our customers are about 50 percent German and 50 percent Japanese," says the clerk here. They have three delis and also a catering service which delivers typical Japanese food mainly to conferences at Japanese companies.

On Immermannstrasse are several Japanese food markets. Shochiku for example supplies almost the same variety as most local supermarkets in Japan. In addition to that they have a video rental and sell typical souvenirs, dishes, lacquer ware and, of course, the major brands of Japanese beers. Out the back is a fish counter where Ryuichi Seshimo from Niigata tells me: "Sushi is very popular in Germany I think. But for me it is funny that the Germans don't like fat tuna. They only want the lean type." When I point at the octopuses in his display he grins and assures me: "These octopuses are also only for our Japanese customers."

Walking around the corner into Marienstrasse where the Japan Club is situated, the Japanese style bakery My Heart can be found. Every employee is Japanese and the design and décor is like any bakery you would find in Japan. Their range of products varies between mochi, toast, sweet rolls made with green tea and filled with the typical red bean paste to sandwiches and hotdogs with lots of mayonnaise.

"I prefer Japanese bread over German bread" claims one of the shopkeepers with an apologetic smile. "The German bread is too hard to chew."

The bakery also has an attached coffee shop. The owner of the bakery, Miwako Tojo keeps a close connection to Japan and tries hard to help her customers to stay connected too. "During the football world championship we set up a satellite connection to Tokyo. So our customers who don't understand German very well can watch Japanese television." Tojo-san says. "We are very proud that we even supply the Japanese football team with bread while they are in Germany."

Beneath these shops, which seem to supply Japanese food for both Japanese and German citizen alike, are a number of arts and crafts shops. But there, the number of customers changes. While the food seems to be bought by everybody the traditional goods draw more Germans into the shop. "Oh, 85 percent of my customers are German." says Hidenori Yoshimatsu, the owner of the shop Kyoto who has lived in Germany for 20 years. "Many of my customers come to my shop because they have a genuine interest in Japan. They like sushi and want to prepare it themselves. So they need knives for cutting the fish and also the appropriate dishes." Apart from knives, traditional arts and crafts like paper lamps, lacquerware, equipment for tea ceremony, and incense can be found in Yoshimatsu-san's shop, which even smells like one of the typical souvenir shops in Arashiyama or east Kyoto.

"When I first came here I worked in a Japanese company. After a while I made myself independent and opened this shop. You know, the youth culture from Japan, things like manga and popmusic are very popular right now in Germany. But I wanted to focus on the traditional side of Japan."

The full meaning of Yoshimatsu's statement that Japanese youth culture is popular in Germany becomes evident when meeting German teenagers on a Saturday afternoon on Immermannstrasse. Like some girls and boys in America-mura in Osaka, these German teenagers dress up like their manga heroes. In small and big groups, and evidently knowing each other they stroll up and down Immermannstrasse.

A Japanese businessman, a Japanese family with a child in a cart standing next to a German teenager dressed up like a figure from a manga makes a striking image.

"This is ordinary street wear for us" says one of the girls, whose nickname is Sho. She wears tall black boots, a pair of black and a pair of pink stockings, which are decoratively ripped, and a lacquer miniskirt and a lacquer top with laces. The style is called ‘visual kei'. They listen to Gazette, Miyavi, X Japan, Dir en Grey and read manga such as Imadoki, Yellow, Gundam or Gravitation and are in this respect probably very similar to their Japanese equivalents in Tokyo and Osaka. "At first your friends introduce you to the music and that's how most of us find out about the manga" replies Sieren to my question about where their way of dressing up originates.

Text & photos: Tanja Poppelreuter