Coffee, care and public recognition in East Asia: a comparative document analysis

How do institutions organise care and public recognition through coffee programmes? We compared documents from Taiwan, Japan and mainland China, coding 66 sources across 12 dimensions: 24 first-party policy and programme texts balanced by jurisdiction and category, 36 scholarly works and six youth-oriented café texts. Coffee provided an occasion for conversation, service labour, recurring meetings, tolerable error, mixed finance and public visibility. The documents establish no therapeutic effect of the beverage itself. Japanese texts positioned cafés within municipal dementia systems. Taiwanese projects made supported capacity visible through coffee service while leaving wages and safeguards unreported. Shanghai projects placed selected memory-café scenes within screening, referral, matched funding and ratings systems. Publicity favoured visible service and group participation by people with dementia. Youth-oriented texts emphasised aspiration, dialogue and an unfinished future. We interpret this contrast in public recognition through the provisional concept of age-stratified loneliness. Age, dementia diagnosis and programme purpose overlap in the sources, so the comparison does not identify an independent age effect. The analysis concerns institutional accounts, not observed participant experience. Evaluators should document sustained relationships, labour and compensation, and access for people who decline or cannot attend, alongside visible service outputs.