Coffee and coffeeshops are quite a beloved part of Japanese culture today, and Japan is one of the biggest consumers of coffee in Asia. Accordingly, coffee's history in Japan is fairly well-documented, as is the larger westernization phenomena Japan underwent in the mid-19th century onwards.

Japan first encountered Coffee in the 17th century, from contact with Dutch traders on Dejima, the artificial island/trading post specifically for Dutch contact. It was likely to have been cosumed very rarely by a limited number of Japanese through this port. The actual first mention of coffee in Japan is by the rangaku scholar Tadao Shizuki in 1782, in his Bankoku Kanki he records that:

「形豆の如くなれども、実は木の実なり」

"its shape is that of a bean, but in truth it is the seed of a tree."

In 1804, the writer Ota Nanpo records his opinions on the beverage, stating:

「紅毛船にて「カウヒイ」といふものを勧む、豆を黒く炒りて粉にし、白糖を和したるものなり。焦げ臭くして味ふるに堪えず。」

I was encouraged to try something called "coffee" on the redhead (Dutch) boats, it's made by roasting beans black, powdered, then mixed with white sugar. It smelled burnt and I couldn't bear the taste at all."

Early exposure to coffee in rangaku mostly focused on the method of preparation and drinking, as well as the botanical and medical aspects of coffee. The doctor Hirokawa Kai for example was interested in the medical benefits coffee might have, in his visit to Nagasaki sometime between 1795-1800, noted down the drip method of preparation, use of milk and sugar, and even mixing the coffee with a type of brown mushroom for optimal medicinal effect. Another document in the late 1700s records the valuable belongings of a Nagasaki prostitute, namely a glass bottle, candles, a Dutch smoking pipe, and a tin of coffee beans. Nonetheless, with limited opportunity to drink Coffee, itself unfavorable to Japanese tastes at the time, coupled with its inaccessibility in the immediate constraints of Dejima and Nagasaki, coffee remained little but a curiosity and fashionable accessory for those in the know.

With the end of sakoku in 1853, Japan's sudden exposure to the world dramatically changed the nation and society on all levels. When Kobe's port was opened for international commercial trade in 1867, a tea exporter company by the name of 放香堂 or Hokodo made trips to the Philippines and other parts of Southeast Asia. Selling Japanese tea leaves abroad, they returned with coffee beans from India, serving it to curious customers in their shop. In this time, everything foreign and western was starting to captivate the public's attention and fascination. In the coming decades, the restored Imperial government would begin its full-scale modernization of the country, promoting western culture and concepts.

Returning to the tea exporter, Hokodo was also to become the first public coffee shop. Opened in 1878, they ground coffee with a mortar. Here is a picture of said store, quite interesting is how it advertises Coffee with the kanji 加琲. The Chinese word for coffee is 咖啡, which uses similar characters. The Hokodo store still exists today, but with the modified 珈琲 in its name. Of note is the differing ways coffee was named in Japan, カウヒイ (kauhii) by Ota Nanpo, as opposed to コーヒー (Kōhī) in modern Japanese.

Ten years later in 1888, Japan's first kissaten opens under the name 可否茶館. There are numerous ways to read this name, Kahisakan supposedly being the main way. The latter two characters 茶館 mean "tea house", while the former two 可否 mean "yes or no?" in Chinese and Japanese, but it might just be a transliteration of the word coffee, being read as kahi. However, 可否 is also synonymous with "advisability" or "recommendation", so perhaps another fair translation could be "Proprietor's Tea House". Wordplay aside, although the opening of the coffee shop indicates some market and affinity towards coffee, in three years time it closed down.

Now then, what exactly is a kissaten? Kissaten (喫茶店) are Japanese cafes, serving coffee, tea, sweets, snacks, and sometimes meals, just like cafes elsewhere in the world. Unique however, is that with the advent of westernization in Japan, cafes served as not only a front to experience western beverages, they may also serve yoshoku, or Japanese-style western food (spaghetti naporitan, korokke, katsu, omurice, hamburg steak, doria, etc). This however, was a late-Meiji and Taisho era development. Also important to note is how kissaten use the 茶 (tea) character in its name, likely stemming from the traditional 茶屋 (teahouse) concepts in Japan. Teahouses flourished in Edo Japan, popping up around poststations and rest stops along busy travel roads. Famously depicted by Hiroshige in works such as The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō, teahouses offered a place to rest and recover after a long days trek between towns. The 喫 in kissaten refer to customs and manners of drinking and enjoying tea, derived originally from China in the Kamakura period.

Kahisakan differs from Hokodo in that the former was a fully-fledged cafe establishment, while the latter merely sold coffee as a store. Though Kahisakan saw only a few years before it shuttered down, Kissaten would truly begin to proliferate during the 1920's, when Japan faced its own roaring twenties during the Taisho Era. While this time is sometimes remembered as "Taisho Democracy", this term is misleading in the political sense due to instability and friction between parties, government, and military. However, socially, Japan continued to modernize, with flourishing literature, music, film, and theater. In this time, kissaten widened to the more general public. Previously during the developments of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, kissaten acted as a salon, where the social elite and intellectuals gathered to gossip and discuss higher matters. As coffee imports increased and prices decreased, coffee cost about ten sen per cup in the 20s. Thus, kissaten were enjoyed by everyday folk, from students to novelists.

By the Second World War however, coffee imports were halted to Japan. People made do with coffee alternatives, brewing mimic beverages made from soybeans, potatoes or dandelion roots. In the postwar years, people were eager for leisure, recreation, and consumer commodities oncemore. Japan's economic revival bore the middle-class many avenues for entertainment, especially in a globalized and capitalistic society. In the 1950's television sets, still expensive for many families, were common features in kissaten, where people would gather whenever they wished to watch a program. Classical music and jazz cafes also sprung up, as records were also pricey and rare. Young people and artists flocked to cafes, able to enjoy western culture and personal expression so heavily suppressed during wartime. This also gave rise to student clubs, groups, and organizations gathering in kissaten for political and social movements. Communist, liberal, and labor union ideologies saw a surge, especially during the worldwide student protests of the 60's. Kissaten still functioned as the gathering place of intellectuals, but it also served as bases for planning and discussion, as well as new "sing-along cafes" where organizations would communally sing Russian and Communist melodies. Jazz and Go-go dance also captured the revolutionary spirit, its free-form, spirited, and eclectic styles alluring young minds sick with the competitiveness and institutional burden of university life. In the 70's, video games and arcades became popular among the youth, and many machines and sets were installed in cafes for this crowd. Cafes would continue to rise in number until the economic bubble burst in the 90's, though, they maintain popularity today, often in the forms of newer sub-culture trends such as maid or manga cafes.

Coffee was actually introduced to Japan relatively early. It was noted that European traders and missionaries drank coffee in the early 1600s (before they were expelled), and shipwrecked Japanese sailors rescued by foreign ships also noted that they were given coffee.

The Dutch East India Company first shipped coffee to Japan in 1690 to their trading port and artificial island of Dejima (Nagasaki). Aside from being drank by Europeans or at meals with Europeans, coffee seem to have been first prized as a medicine (like in Europe). A major influence for introducing coffee to the Japanese was European medicine. The Swedish Doctor Carl Peter Thumberg for example arrived in Japan in 1775 and began treating, and teaching, Japanese. His translator notes

Kohii-it is habitually drunk by Hollanders; its shape is that of a pea or soybean but it is from a tree. They grind it, put it into hot water, wait for a while and add sugar and drink it. Kohii is like tea for us.

Another doctor, the German Philipp Franz von Siebold, arrived in Dejima in 1823. He says to his Japanese students, coffee tasted appallingly bitter, like some "Chinese" medicines. It was noted that coffee (supposedly) provided "heating" of the body and could be used to treat illnesses caused by the "cold". It was likely for this reason that the Bakufu sent gifts of coffee to domains in northern Honshū and Hokkaidō.

Scholars of rangaku (Dutch studies), many of which studied western medicine under the "Dutch" (many doctors and scholars who came to Japan with the VOC were not Dutch, von Siebold supposedly lied to Japanese authorities that he was "mountain Dutch" when they thought his accent sounded weird), helped spread coffee among the Japanese. It was noted by these scholars in the late 18th and early 19th century that coffee strengthen appetite, cure headaches and "women's diseases," and stop diarrhea, as in western medical texts. They note that the Dutch rank it in the morning and evening, and that coffee energizes your mentality, and that if you take it before and after breakfast and lunch, it also helps digestion. Interestingly, some rangaku scholars added things not in western medical texts, like "leading to repose and sleep." How that doesn't conflict with "energizes your mentality" is a mystery to me, though it might be someone pushing coffee as a miracle drug.

Because of its reputation as a drug, it was quickly sold to the Japanese. First record was in 1724, and soon the Satsuma daimyō requested the Dutch to send him some. When Shōgun Yoshimune received the VOC delegation in 1725, he asked them about the tea they drank. The response was, "we have no sencha or bancha [types of Japanese green tea], but we do have karacha." 唐茶 Karacha literally means "Chinese tea", but by its description seemed to have meant coffee. 唐 kara, the same kanji for the Tang Dynasty, was used to mean many things taken in from the foreign trade, and coffee seemed to have also been one of them.

By von Siebold's time, some Japanese seemed to have began drinking coffee for pleasure. To be sure, not everyone liked it. The poet Ōta Nanpo said in 1804:

I had something called "kauhii" on the red barbarian [Dutch] ship. It's beans roasted black and made into a powder, softened with white sugar. It tastes burned. I can't stand its taste.

But it was popular enough that coffee was among a surviving 1797 list of items Dutch traders gave to prostitutes in Nagasaki, to whom the Dutch taught to drink coffee with honey and who found it helpful for staying awake during work. Also on 1797, a merchant by the name of Ide Youemon formally gave an offering of "kohie" to the gods at Dazaifu Tenmangu Shrine, one of the oldest and holiest shrines in Japan. Von Siebold also noted that there were Japanese who overindulged in coffee, who used pickled plum as an antidote (since pickled plum supposedly "cools", countering coffee's "heating").

Von Siebold himself also promoted coffee. He wrote to the VOC to:

Send several thousand pounds of coffee to Japan annually. You have to roast it, grind it, and put it in a nice can or jar. Write detailed instructions on how to cook and drink it, and stick that paper onto the container.

Von Siebold also noted a couple of things hindering coffee's spread in Japan. One is they had no experience in roasting. The other is that Japanese did not like milk. According to Buddhism (at least in Japan), milk is "white blood" and drinking it is a sin. Despite such challenges, by 1866 coffee was popular enough that the Bakufu put a tariff on it.

Once in the Meiji, an even greater number of Japanese adopted coffee. The large number of officials and scholars who went to Europe and the US saw the popularity of coffee and it was seen as part of "civilization" and "modernity". コーヒー糖 (kōhītō "coffee sugar") brought coffee to the countryside as a ball of sugar with a ground coffee core that you can dissolve in hot water to drink. Apparently you can still buy it today as "a taste of hometown." A version of this that was popular in Ōsaka was noted by one author as the means for merchants to deliver to rural Kansai farmers "the taste of bunmei kaika [civilization and enlightenment]." The Meiji government, eager to improve the Japanese diet (by copying the west) told its citizens to eat beef and then follow it up with coffee as a digestive. Both were at first spread under the guise of "medicine" because they broke Buddhist rules.

Coffee shops were first opened in Japan in the late 1880s, copied from western styles. The first was opened by a retired bureaucrat from the Foreign Ministry called Tei-Ei-kei. Tei's father had sent him to Yale, but he left in 1879 without finishing. In 1888, Tei oppened the 可否茶館 Kahiisakan. It was made like English coffeehouses, with newspapers, leather chairs, billiard tables, writing desks and supplies, even baths and nap rooms. For all this, Tei only charged 1 sen 5 ri (1.5 sen) for a cup of coffee, 2 sen with milk (a carpenter/construction worker's daily wage was 27 sen). So the Kahiisakan unfortunately went out of business in less than 5 years.

Other shops quickly popped up to replace it though. The coffee shop is where political and financial news was shared. Donald Richie notes also that the coffee shop

is where one first glimpses the foreign innovation that will shortly become Japanese. In the musical coffee shops you first heard Schoenberg, in the artistic coffeeshops you first saw a picture of a Giacometti...many of the pieces of various foreign cultures are lying there."

The café's place was of such importance to social exchange that in the 1920s a commentator said "the café was even more significant than the Diet." Another noted in 1930s that the coffee might have given Japan its entry into the world of modern nations.

Around the same time, Brazil had began to contract large number of Japanese to work their plantations, including for coffee. One such worker was Mizuno Ryō, who made an immigration service to bring Japanese to Brazil. Around the same time, Brazil was suffering from an overproduction of coffee beans and looked to Japan as a potential customer. In 1887, 18 tonnes were sent to Japan for free. Around the turn of the century, the government of São Paulo reached out to Mizuno, offering him 1,000 hyō of coffee beans free of charge (about 60 tonnes) with the mission to spread Brazilian coffee in Japan. Mizuno opened the Café Paulista (named after São Paulo where Japanese migrant farmers worked) with over 23 stores in Tōkyō and Ōsaka by 1911, later growing to close to 50 across Japan, with stores in Shanghai as well, and was according to Merry White the world's first coffeehouse chain. The Tōkyō main store in Ginza (restored in 1970, John Lennon and Yōko Ono visited it in 1978, it's still there) was incredibly successful, with 70,000 customers a month. It was a three-story white building with chandeliers, Brazilian flags, gilded furniture, mirrored walls and wooden floors. Waiters were dressed in Brazilian naval uniforms with epaulets and gold bindings. The store was the first to offer sugars for free (soon followed by everyone else), and also sold snacks like malasada, coupons, and coffee syrup so customers could make coffee at home. If you wore geta, the traditional Japanese wooden sandals, you had to take them off, but if you wore western shoes you could leave them on. Mizuno was not just selling coffee, he was selling "modern" culture.

At first coffee was originally only available to the wealthy, being an expensive important. But thanks to cheap (or, at first, free) Brazilian supplies, it became available for the regular people, and Brazilian coffee became the common type. Mizuno's other stores were also really popular, with the Ōsaka and Kobe stores having 52,000 and 28,000 customers a month. With popularity also came detractors, who called it hangout for bums. But that couldn't stop its popularity. Brazil also supported other enterprises, like the Café Brasileiro, the Brasileiro, and the first coffee trade journal in Japan, and even women's literary journals.

Other coffee shops also popped up, like the Café Printemps, a French style café that also served wine and food. There was also the Café Tiger and Café Lion that used beautiful waitresses kind of like a forerunner to the modern maid café. By 1936, there were 18,000 cafés in Japan and they were importing close to 3,500 tonnes of coffee beans, including 24.9% of Brazil's coffee crop. From there, coffee's popularization was only stalled by WWII, and with the economic recovery coffee and café returned and became a normal part of urban Japanese life.

For Japan, Coffee has always been associated with modernity and "Western" ways of living and culture. The author Merry White has written an interesting book about coffee culture called "Coffee Life in Japan". In it, they describe briefly the life of Tei Ei-kei, also known as Nishimura Tsurukichi, who is credited with creating the first western style Cafe or Coffeehouse in Japan, the “Kahiichakan” (also sometimes referred to as the “Kahiisakan”). You can still find a monument in his honor in Ueno-Hirokoji (Tokyo) at the site of the coffeehouse.

Ei-kei was the biological son of a man named Tomosuke, whose foster son Tei Ei-nei adopted Ei-kei and raised as his own. (This complicated family history is not as unusual as it may seem, but is a discussion for elsewhere.) Tei Ei-nei was, himself, a Taiwanese born man who worked for the Japanese foreign ministry. This resulted in the young Tei Ei-kei learning Chinese, French, Japanese, and English by the age of 14. At the age of 16 he attended Yale in the United States. It was while in the USA that Ei-Kei gained his love of coffee. He unfortunately did not finish his studies, reportedly either due to poor health or spending too much of his time in Coffeehouses in New York. He left America in 1879 and traveled back to Japan via Europe, where he spent time in famous coffeehouses such as the Langbourne in London and the Café Royal in Picadilly. After returning to Japan Ei-kei spent a few years teaching in Okayama as well as working for the Ministry of Finance. He suffered tragedy over these years with the death his wife to tuberculosis and losing his home to a fire. In 1888 he bought a western style house Ueno and opened the Kahiichakan as a place of “masculine amenities”. White highlights the importance of western culture in Japan at this time and its intrinsic associations with Modernity. For example, a major point of cultural discussion during this period was the creation of the Rokumeikan, a controversial western style building created as a dance hall to host Waltzes and other Western entertainments. The Rokumeikan was contentious, as traditionalists railed against it as a symbol of Western imperialism and destruction of Japanese values. The site deserves a full description by someone better read in its history than me, but for our story it is important as a symbol of the cultural cache that Western… anything had in Japan during the Meiji era. The Rokumeikan was a place where the traditional class boundaries that were present in Edo Japanese society of the previous era could be broken, and Western social expectations could override the Japanese ones. Commoners, merchants, and Samurai could mix and dance together in a Western fashion and with Western social expectations. In a similar way, Ei-kei wanted to have his coffeehouse be a mirror of those from Europe and offer both the modern amenities (such as public tobacco smoking and cigars) as well as the culture of social mixing and cross class engagement that was associated with European coffeehouse culture. White also notes that to the Japanese living under the aspirational government slogan of Bunmei Kaika (“Civilization and Enlightenment”), both of these concepts were inherently “western”. A friend of Ei-kei’s, Terashita Tatsuo, is quoted as recalling that Ei-kei wanted to “do something for the younger generation by opening a coffeehouse, which would be a space to share knowledge, a social salon where ordinary people, students, and youths could gather… not like the Rokumeikan where things are only superficial”. Ei-kei sought a space where young Japanese could mingle and break down class barriers, no matter if they were working class or Samurai.

The Kahiichkan coffeehouse only lasted 5 years. While he was a great dreamer and lover of coffee, Ei-kei was a terrible businessman. This failure, along with later problems in his second marriage and bankruptcy due to financial speculation, led him to try and commit suicide. A friend found his suicide note and managed to convince him to spare his own life. This friend also help Ei-kei change his name to Nishimura Tsurukichi and move to America, where he settled in Seattle. While there he again tried to open a small shop but this venture also failed and he died at the age of 36 penniless. He is buried in the Lakeview cemetery under the name T. Nishimura.

White’s book explores coffee culture in Japan primarily in the post-WW2 era, and I have not found much else that examines Ei-kei in greater detail than her work (at least in English…). It would seem however that coffee has always been associated with Western culture and Modernity in Japan, despite it being introduced to the island as early as the 1500s with the Portugese. In chapters such as “Japan’s Liquid Power”, White discusses the transition from Coffee from being solely a “western” drink and its adoption into Japanese artisan culture through the 20s and 30s. So, to more directly address your question, Coffee in Japan was seen as being in cultural “opposition” to Tea culture in Japan, and a symbol of desirable modernism at the time of its initial popularity.

White, Merry, “Coffee in Public: Cafes in Urban Japan” in Coffee Life in Japan, 1-18. University of California Press, 2012

White, Merry, “Japan’s Liquid Power” in Coffee Life in Japan, 89-107. University of California Press, 2012

EDIT: formatting

Wow this is (kinda) my time- I can't speak for China or Korea however I do know a little about coffee culture in Japan. I would check out "Feeding Japan" edited by Andreas Niehaus and Tine Walravens published in 2017. It is a great book and there is a chapter about coffee written by Helena Grinshupun. Grinshupun also has another great article about Japanese coffee culture called, "Deconstructing a global commodity: Coffee, culture, and consumption in Japan". The last source is a book by Merry White called, 'Coffee life in Japan', printed in 2012. My area of research is bread, wheat and milling but I'll do my best to give a brief history of coffee in Japan for you.

Coffee first arrived in Japan with the Dutch traders in the 17th century. However it is only in the latter half of the nineteenth century that coffee was widely available to the Japanese public (Grinshupun, 2017). In 1888, the first coffeehouse in Japan opened up in Tokyo. These first coffeehouses were modeled on British coffeehouses or French salons and served as an entry point for other foreign goods (Grinshupun, 2012). Coffeehouses were seen as exotic and modern places for the Japanese people to go as they were surrounded by western architecture and served by staff wearing western style clothing (Grinshupun, 2017). They became a symbol of the new modern Japan. Most of these shops were centered in Ginza district of Tokyo. The adoption of coffee by the elite was a conscious decision by the Meiji Government in an effort to modernize Japan after ending its period of self-isolation (Grinshupun, 2017). Japan saw the western imperial model as the one to emulate on the road to modernity which involved adopting aspects of western culture.

Coffeehouses in the 1920s and 30s became important cultural spaces for socialization that not only catered to the elite but to the growing middle class. The coffeehouses created a place for young women to get a job and move to the city from the countryside. The coffeehouse also offered one of the few spaces in Japanese society where girls and boys could meet and socialize (Grinshupun, 2017). They were no longer seen as exotic places but places where modern Japanese people could socialize or find work. Much like western coffeehouses during the enlightenment period, students, artists and intellectuals began frequenting them and discussing politics (Grinshupun, 2017). It was these meetings, and the association of coffee as western, that led to restrictions being placed on coffee in the late 1930s (Grinshupun, 2017).

In the 1940 the importation of coffee was stopped and coffee substitutes were made to keep shops running. It was only after the war, with the arrival of the American G.I.s, that coffee began to rise in popularity again. Jazz cafes became popular spaces for the middle class to go and became a part of Japan's musical scene (Grinshupun, 2017). In the 1960s and 1970s coffee shops again became sites for political discussion (Grinshupun, 2017). From 1980 onward cafes boomed and became synonymous with urban life and diversified to cater to a wide range of interests and clientele. Coffee chains entered the Japanese market in the 1990s and early 2000s spreading coffee and coffee culture with them. These chains offered different styles of coffee making coffee more palatable to younger and not typical coffee drinkers (Grinshupun, 2017).

However, it was the invention of canned coffee that truly made coffee commonplace in Japanese society. (Interestingly, the inventor of canned coffee, Miura Yoshitake, was a manager of a green tea store.) Miura partnered with a canning company to develop a sweetened canned coffee that he released in 1965 (Grinshupun, 2017). Unfortunately due to financial difficulties Miura's coffee didn't last and went under. But the idea proved compelling and in 1969 Ueshima Coffee Corp. released a canned coffee with sweetener and milk. You can still buy this coffee today as well as many other brands of canned coffee across Japan.

Despite coffee's proliferation into the everyday lives of Japanese citizens through cafes and canned coffee it still is seen as western. It is part of coffee's branding that it is western (Grinshupun, 2012). Coffee's lexicon, what coffee is served in, and the decor of the cafes are all western. While a kanji (Chinese character) word for coffee does exist in Japanese the katakana (syllabic writing system used for foreign words) is more popular. Within Japanese culture the myth of what is Japanese and what is 'other' is extremely strong. So while green tea is seen as 'Japanese' according to the All Japan Coffee Association, Japan’s consumption of coffee, both roasted and instant, accounted for twice as much as its consumption of green tea. Moreover, Japan is the number three importer of coffee beans worldwide after the United States and Germany (Grinshupun, 2012). Furthermore the coffee that is imported and processed in Japan are of the highest quality, and Japanese coffee equipment is considered to be among the best in the world (White, 2012). But, coffee has yet to be naturalized into Japanese culture.

I don't know if that is what you were looking for? But hopefully that is a start? Sorry it is kind of disjointed I wasn't sure what angel you wanted and it was getting long winded.

References:

Grinshupun, H. 2013. Deconstructing a global commodity: Coffee, culture, and consumption in Japan. Journal of Consumer Culture 14(3), pp. 343-364. doi: 10.1177/1469540513488405.

Grinshupun, H. 2017. The Drink of the Nation? Coffee in Japan’s Culinary Culture. In: Niehaus, A. and Walravens, T. ed. Feeding Japan : the cultural and political issues of dependency and risk. 1st ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan

White, M. 2012. Coffee life in Japan. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.

Japan has already been discussed in detail. Hopefully somebody can cover China. As for Korea:

Coffee is a relatively newcomer to Korea, and had a top-down introduction, with King Gojong (r. 1863-1907, as Emperor Gojong 1897-1907). He is described as the first Korean to regularly drink coffee, beginning with the year he ruled Korea from the Russian Legation in Seoul (where he fled for security from the Japanese after the murder of his wife Queen Min by Japanese agents in 1895). His first cup of coffee was supposedly served by German-born Antoinette Sontag, sister-in-law of the Russian ambassador. She later ran the first Western hotel in Seoul, Sontag Hotel. The building was a gift from King Gojong. In it, she opened the first coffee shop in Korea.

Korea had only recently ended its isolation, in 1876 with Japan-Korea Treaty (AKA the Treaty of Ganghwa, after the island where Korean guns engaged a Japanese gunboat in 1875 when the Japanese pulled a Matthew Perry of their own against Korea, with Inoue Yoshika in the role of Perry (earlier, Ganghwado had been occupied by the French in their unsuccessful invasion of 1866, and the forts similar destroyed by the US Navy in 1871 when the USA attempted to force the opening of Korea)). This was followed by treaties with Western powers (e.g., the USA, with the treaty negotiated in 1882 and accepted by the Korean government in 1884. Thus, there was only a brief window of opportunity for the popularisation of coffee in Korea before King Gojong's year in the Russian Legation.

Thus, when Antoinette Sontag opened her coffee shop, coffee was not yet a common or even familiar drink in Korea. Her early clientele was a combination of Westerners and Japanese in Korea, both diplomats and visitors, and the Korean elite. Korean independence soon came to an end, with annexation by Japan. The coffee shop continued as an elite establishment, becoming a version of the Japanese coffee shop, the kissaten (喫茶店, "tea-drinking shop", pronounced kkikdajeom in Korean) during the Japanese colonial period. They were favoured hangouts of intellectuals (who were, in ultra-Confucian Korea, members of the elite, as the elite were education, and the educated were the elite) and the new style of Korean elite: businessmen.

The coffee shop survived independence, the Korean War, and post-war modernisation. The range of drinks served - tea and traditional Korean non-tea teas and other hot drinks in addition to coffee - helped coffee shops survive wartime coffee and sugar shortages (during both WWII and the Korean War), and restricted post-war coffee imports. The dabang (茶房, "tea house" or "tea room") continued as a meeting place for intellectuals and businessmen, and was definitely upper-class, with attentive service and attractive hostesses serving the drinks to a male clientele. Earlier, business had often been conducted in kisaeng houses (a kisaeng being essentially the Korean equivalent of the Japanese geisha), so the main change was a shift of beverages from alcohol to tea, coffee, and traditional Korean non-tea teas and other hot drinks (alcohol continued to lubricate the wheels of business, in restaurants and bars). The focus was not coffee (or tea), but socialisation.

Meanwhile, the Korean War had ignited a revolution in Korean coffee culture: US soldiers had brought instant coffee to Korea. Instant coffee brought coffee into the Korean home, and to the middle classes. Especially with Korean production of instant coffee beginning in the 1970s, and sachets combining instant coffee, sugar, and milk powder made it a very easy and convenient drink for the home and office. A consequence was an explosion in the number of coffee houses, with an increasingly middle-class and female clientele. Different coffee houses attracted different people. Some continued as places of business, and others attracted fashion-oriented middle-class women. Others acted as hotbeds of political activism, serving as meeting places for students in the pro-democracy movement. Others were favoured venues for dating.

The next big shift in Korean coffee culture was the introduction of large coffee chains such as Starbucks (whose first Korean store opened in 1999), and take-away coffee, at the end of the 20th century. The number of old-style coffee houses fell, but the large chains easily made up for the difference. Compared to the older coffee shops, which were places to chat to friends, make business deals, and talk politics, with buying coffee and tea the price paid for the use of the space for social/business activity, the new establishments are much more about coffee - consumption, not social activity.

The newest trend has been a shift from instant coffee to espresso and capsule coffee. Traditionally, Korean coffee was mild and soft-flavoured, and espresso was challengingly bitter to Korean tastes. Old-style coffee houses typically served drip-filter coffee, but modern takeaway coffee required something faster, and espresso was an answer.

In summary, coffee began as one of the drinks in coffee houses (literally, "tea houses") for the elite, places for business deals, the intelligentsia, and political talk. In the 1970s, there was a major shift to instant coffee in the home and office, and a large growth in coffee houses for the middle classes and women. Coffee houses continued more as social spaces than as places just to drink coffee; vending machines and instant coffee provided coffee-for-coffee's-sake cheaply and conveniently. Lastly, at the turn of the century, the Starbuckification of retail coffee, and the espressoisation of home and office coffee.

Reference:

Bak, Sangmee, "From Strange Bitter Concoction to Romantic Necessity: The Social History of Coffee Drinking in South Korea", 45(2), 37-59 (2005). https://ekoreajournal.net/issue/index2.htm?Idx=409