Video Chat with Japanese Women, free in your browser

Cafe is a random video chat: you press start, Cafe pairs you with another person who pressed start, and both cameras come on within seconds. There is no profile to read first, so the opening seconds of the call do all the introducing.

A greeting that fits her clock makes a good start. Konnichiwa is the daytime hello and konbanwa the evening one, and because Japan is hours ahead of Europe and the Americas, it is often already evening on her side while it is still morning on yours. In Japan a greeting often comes with a small bow; on camera, a slight nod of the head does the same job.

That is all there is to random video chat on Cafe: no browsing, just people.

Every call is one on one, with nobody else joining and no time limit, and every person you meet is a verified real user. If a conversation is not going anywhere, skip: skipping is free and unlimited, and nobody needs a reason to move on.

Calls with only the two of you, from hello to goodbye, are what 1v1 video chat means here.

Leaving can be polite too. Shitsurei shimasu, roughly excuse me, is the formal way to end a call in Japanese. With someone your own age, jā ne or mata ne, both close to see you, is plenty.

Japanese is the main language of Japan, and English is a school subject there, so a call can run in either one or move back and forth. If you are not sure, ask early. Eigo de daijōbu desu ka? asks whether English is all right, and it settles the question politely in the first minute.

Written Japanese mixes three scripts. Hiragana carries the grammar, the small words and endings that hold a sentence together. Kanji, characters that came from Chinese, carry most of the meaning. Katakana is used mainly for words borrowed from other languages, and a large share of those came from English.

That last group is good news for an English speaker. Bideo is video, kamera is camera, pasokon is a personal computer and sumaho is a shortened smartphone. Said with Japanese vowels, every syllable even and clear, many of them will sound familiar, and asking what she calls the things around her turns a word list into a conversation.

Japan has one time zone, Japan Standard Time, nine hours ahead of UTC. It does not use daylight saving time, so the clocks there never change during the year. The gap to Japan moves only when your own clocks do.

From London, Tokyo is nine hours ahead in winter and eight in summer. From New York it is fourteen hours ahead in winter and thirteen in summer, which turns a Tokyo evening into a New York morning. An evening call from the US East Coast lands in the late morning of the next day in Japan.

Greetings follow the clock as well. Ohayō gozaimasu is good morning, konnichiwa covers the daytime and konbanwa takes over in the evening. Oyasuminasai, good night, is what you say when one of you is about to go to sleep.

Calls are free, and so is skipping, as often as you like. There is no subscription and no time limit on a conversation. You do not need a card to start, and you do not need an account either.

Coins exist for one thing: the gender filter. Create an account and 125 coins arrive free, so you can try the filter before you think about buying any. If you do buy coins later, they show up discreetly on your card statement.

A side by side of what is free and what uses coins is kept under free video chat on this site.

Cafe Video Chat, or YourCafe, opens in the browser you already use. Go to the site, press start, allow the camera and microphone when the browser asks, and the first call begins. Nothing has to be installed, on a phone or on a computer.

Android also has the Cafe app on Google Play, for anyone who prefers an app to a tab. There is no iPhone app, and none is needed: on an iPhone, Cafe opens in Safari or any other browser and works the same way.

Before you press start, sit somewhere you can talk out loud without worrying about the room, and check that your face is in the frame. The person on the other side sees exactly what your camera sees, from the very first second.

The people on Cafe come from more than 100 countries, and each day tens of thousands of them press start. The Meet pages each look at one group of women, with their own greetings, languages and time zones, and all of them lead to the same free call.

To see every page side by side, open video chat with women on the Meet index.