Shopping Guide
Milla Sainio and Tomi Turunen seem like your average otaku couple. Since childhood, they loved Japanese anime and manga. There is something that is not so ordinary about them though: they created Northern Europe’s first manga cafe.
Manga cafes, which are already well-known in Japan, combine a manga library and a cafe where food and drinks can be ordered. Customers can purchase their favorite food or drink items and freely browse bookshelves full of manga in a relaxing environment. Having thought about wanting to open a business related to manga culture someday, in April 2009, Milla, who worked at a cell phone store, and Tomi, who currently works at a game company, opened the first Japanese style manga cafe in Helsinki, Finland. Of course, for them, it was an easy decision. However, the venture was a challenge because it was a style of business they had never experienced before. The name of their manga cafe is, surprisingly enough, Manga Cafe. The name came about when Tomi was able to acquire the name Manga Cafe on Facebook. Tomi explained while laughing, “At the time, I was so impatient, fired up, and in such a hurry that I just created the account!”
Currently, Finland looks to be the representative otaku country in Europe. Anime conventions are held 10-20 times or more a year, the biggest being AnimeCon, which attracts 150,000 people, and Japanese anime and manga culture is becoming widely accepted. Finland has always been very interested in Japan, and now the number of translated publications of Japanese manga into Finnish outnumbers even Swedish publications. In Finland’s neighbor, Denmark, translated versions of Japanese manga into Danish are few and the price is high, so many fans end up reading the English version. Even though the price is still relatively high, domestic publications have spread throughout Finland, giving fans a great opportunity to immerse themselves in Japanese manga.
Milla dreamed of working within the Japanese manga culture that she loved so much, as well as making a place where young people could hang out. Thus, Manga Cafe was born. The difficulty of a manga cafe is that it is not a bookstore that makes a profit from selling books, and, because it is more niche than an ordinary cafe, if it doesn’t receive a strong backing from customers, it will fail. Manga Cafe originally started as a small space with only 19 seats. The interior was decorated with popular characters and they even had an original mascot for the store. Their mascot, by the way, is a cat named Kissa, the Japanese word for “manga cafe” that is also widely known in Finnish. Due to word of mouth from fans, their popularity grew, and they moved to a bigger space with 60 seats. For their success, Milla and Tomi won an award targeted at young entrepreneurs, and they were acknowledged by the embassy for their contribution to spreading Japanese culture.
Even though Manga Cafe also has comics from Finland, America, and France, 95% are manga from Japan. In the future, Milla and Tomi would like to open a branch of their manga cafe in a neighboring country and establish a business in Japan. In everything they do, they want to promote manga culture. Milla and Tomi are currently in Japan for Comic Market, and when we met with them, their resolve was clear to see. Keep an eye out for this duo as they continue to promote manga culture throughout Europe.
http://www.mangacafe.fi/ (Finnish/English version coming soon)
http://facebook.com/MangaCafe/ (Finnish)
http://shoppu.fi/ (Finnish)
http://blog.mangacafe.fi/ (Finnish)
