Once a month around lunchtime in a suburb of Tokyo, a 12-seat cafe transforms into a pop-up "dementia café". It's a lovely idea.
Lovingly named the Café of Mistaken Orders, the dementia café concept first sprung up in Japan in 2017 as an innovative way to creatively engage dementia patients. With 30 percent of Japan's population over the age of 65, and over 6 million Japanese people estimated to have dementia, the café is a bright spot of humanity, generating multiple benefits.
Employing elders with dementia help keep them physically and mentally active - it’s a safe space where they can interact with new people, be productive and feel needed - key to slowing down the progression of dementia, a neurodegenerative disease that has no cure. Also, importantly, the café helps the general public get involved and to understand the effects of dementia.
The café's diners arrive expecting their orders to have errors - they come not only for the food, but for the connection to humanity that gets served up in spades.
In one of the first pop-ups, just over one third of orders were incorrectly delivered but 99 percent of customers said they were happy with the service. "A lot of elderly people are either in nursing homes or are just sort of shut away in their homes, so I hope that our initiative will give people with dementia something to look forward to," Yui Iwata, who helps run the café, told The Washington Post.
"If people get a deeper understanding, it would become easier for people with dementia to go out, as well."