Backyard Coffee and Jazz in Kyoto

This reminds me very much of one of my favourite series on Netflix, Midnight Diner (not Midnight Diner - Tokyo Stories, which is a Netflix remake with many of the same cast, but not as enjoyable as the original in my opinion). Most of the action centres around a group of regulars talking while at a small izakaya in Shinjuku, Tokyo, which is run by someone known only as "Master" and only opens from midnight to 7am. You see a bit of their lives outside, but it always reverts back to the izakaya where they debate on various topics. Given the setting, each episode feels a bit like a theatre play.

I tend to react a bit allergic to the Japan-everything fetishizing so prominent on Hacker News (although I've come to realize that it's mostly Americans holding up an example of everything they feel they lack domestically, and in that sense isn't so much about Japan as it is about America), but perhaps it's an interesting data point that at as a grumpy cynic I still want to second this recommendation. :)

For one reason or another, the Japanese school of story-telling has a pretty prominent streak of this type of low-stakes, downtempo "slice of life" premise like this, that I find very satisfying. The director Hirokazu Koreeda has made many films of this type as well. For a while my wife and I would alternate watching Spanish films by Pedro Almodóvar and Koreeda on movie night, working through both catalogs, which somehow made a lot of sense together.

I have never seen a Koreeda film but he sounds compelling -- which movie would you recommend for a first-timer?

If you’re in the mood for an almost unbearably moving one, would recommend Nobody Knows.