The Japanese kurīmu sōda drawn as a coloring page: a tall footed glass of green melon soda with a scoop of vanilla ice cream floating on top, a cherry, a mint leaf and a long spoon. Ice cubes, rising bubbles and the ribbed stem of the glass fill the page with small shapes, so this one takes longer than it looks and suits someone who wants a piece to settle into. The color sample shows how the drink is meant to look, which is useful here, since the colours are the whole character of it. This is a fixture of the old Japanese coffee house and works well as a reminiscence prompt with older adults. The PDF has two pages: a color sample and the plain line art. Free to download and print, with no registration.
🗣 Conversation Starters — for care activities and family time
Do you remember ordering a cream soda in a coffee house?
Was there a café you used to go to often? What was it like inside?
Melon, cola or orange — did you have a favourite?
Did you know that old-style coffee houses have come back into fashion?
Where does cream soda come from?
The ancestor is the American ice cream soda of the late nineteenth century — soda water, flavoured syrup and a scoop of ice cream, served across a drugstore fountain counter. What Japan made of it went its own way: green melon soda with vanilla ice cream on top, in a tall footed glass, which became a fixture of the junkissa, the plain, coffee-first tea room of the Shōwa era. One point of confusion for English speakers: ‘cream soda’ in Britain and the United States usually means a vanilla-flavoured soft drink with no ice cream in it at all, so the Japanese drink is closer to what an American menu would call a float. Interest in it has revived recently along with a broader taste for Shōwa-era design.
Why is the melon soda green?
Because it is coloured that way. Very few of these drinks contain any melon juice; the flavour comes from aroma compounds and the colour from added colouring. The green was chosen to signal ‘melon’ rather than to match a real one — the muskmelons Japan prizes are pale green outside and orange inside, so the colour is a convention, not a likeness. None of which has stopped it becoming a taste in its own right, one that Japanese drinkers recognise instantly and associate firmly with the room it is served in.
Why has the coffee-house cream soda stayed popular?
It did not, for a while. The spread of café chains through the 1990s and 2000s pushed the old junkissa to the margins, and the drink went quiet with them. From around the 2010s a younger generation rediscovered those rooms — the velvet chairs, the etched glass, the hand-written menus, the cigarette-stained ceilings — and the cream soda turned out to photograph extremely well, which did the rest. It is now nearly as much a photographic subject as a drink, and a number of coffee houses have leaned into that by offering the soda in a row of different colours.
