What Japan does different is that it has sensible zoning laws that are designed around foot traffic rather than car traffic. Why don't you have small shops like this in the U.S.? Because of minimum parking space requirements for cars.
I would cross out "even" in that sentence, and then step back and admire it. This is one of the best things about Japan. For some bizarre reason there is an implicit assumption (at least in many places in Europe, especially Central Europe) that 12m2 of public shared city space should be reserved for your metal box on wheels and that it's somehow a right.
You have my sympathy.
In comparison, even here in Europe there are tight rows of cars in almost every street, reducing space for greenery, eating up sidewalks, making street crossing dangerous and sometimes even making the street hard to navigate for the cars themselves, not to mention making quick stops for taxi drivers or food & grocery delivery cars almost impossible.
An example is where I'm from, in Canada. Licensing for cars is easy. Business licenses are easy enough, if they're non-physical.
But opening a bar means at least $50k of licenses/compliance costs. To have a bar, you need to serve food. To serve food, there's minimum requirements for all sorts of things from electrical to ventilation to plumbing. So you need to apply to the city to do a study and plebiscite in the neighborhood to determine no one objects to your bar. You need to have an engineer sign off on your design and the fire department to sign off on that. Liquor license is $$$.
And that's before even bringing up the cost of the lease (1 year rent as deposit) or the actual construction costs (last I checked, over $400 per square foot).
And this is how you end up with excellent public transport, no SUVs, and like the lowest traffic death rate in the world.
There’s little need for efficient allocation of essentially infinite space outside of urban areas constrained by geological features. And in those places parking comes at a premium too even in Western countries.
Is that why highways that are 26 lanes wide are needed?
This is not true. In a big city there are plenty of locations without parking or rely on public street parking. The issues are the onerous zoning, licensing and insurance requirements.
(semi-rhetorical, but that's exactly the discussion we're having here, whether people should be allowed a backyard coffee shop)