Coffee only

On a side street in Ginza, Tokyo, there's a small coffee bar called Café de l'Ambre. It opened in 1948. Its founder, Ichiro Sekiguchi, named it after a colour. Amber, he explained, is "the ideal shade of coffee, of course."

The sign outside says Coffee Only, and for seven decades that was the work. The café uses aged green beans, rested before they're roasted, and brews by hand through cloth filters. It still roasts its own coffee today.

In 2016, when Sekiguchi was 101, The Guardian reported that he was still roasting coffee every day. He was born in 1914 and died in 2018, reportedly at 103. For seventy of them, he did one thing, in one small room, and did it carefully.

The slow version

There's nothing dramatic in this story, and that's why it's here. No record, no final lap. Just a man who found what he wanted to do with his days and kept doing it long after anyone would have forgiven him for stopping.

The café is still open at 8-10-15 Ginza. You can sit at the counter and watch someone pour, slowly, one cup at a time.