After the destruction of the Shiseido Parlour and store during the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923, Shinzo Fukuhara asked his friend, artist Riichiro Kawashima, with whom he had stayed in Paris in 1912, to design new interiors. The full-fledged café expanded upon Arinobu Fukuhara’s original soda fountains—which were inspired by the American drugstores he saw in New York in 1900—and which offered soft drinks and ice cream. Although Shinzo’s new structures were called barracks, an adaption of the English term for such temporary quarters, they were in fact very elaborate, producing an air of refinement and stability in a devastated city.