From the issue dated November 28, 2003
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In Japan, Books Are Windows to the World
Osaka is not even Japan's second city. But its biggest bookstore dwarfs anything in New York, Los Angeles, or, indeed, Chicago. Like all Japanese cities, Osaka is filled with the most modern, and postmodern, skyscrapers. In one of the largest, in the middle of town, the first three stories are taken over by the Junkudo bookstore, which contains some 600,000 titles. That is far more than at the largest Barnes & Noble superstore. The ground-floor entrance is filled with manga, the Japanese comics that are increasingly beginning to be read in the United States, and that have an incredible claim on the reading public. More than 250 million copies are sold each year, not only to youngsters and adolescents, but to grown-ups as well. As has often been commented upon by travel writers, it is not unusual to see men unashamedly reading a pornographic manga on the train. But while the proliferation of comics worries publishers who fear the readers will not graduate to proper books, the choice available to the serious readers is still worthy of note. The second floor of the immense bookstore is filled with endless shelves of popular culture -- books on film, theater, and pop stars of every kind -- as well as current Japanese fiction. But when one reaches the third floor, the display of intellectual fare is striking. When I visited, I looked to see how many books were available from not only the authors my own house publishes but also many of the others who are basic to Western intellectual life. Shelf after shelf, containing 20 to 30 titles, could be found entirely devoted to the works of Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, Michel Foucault, Hannah Arendt, et al. To be sure, the books grow in translation, so that the four volumes of Foucault's Dits et Ecrits have become 10 slimmer volumes in Japanese, an investment for the reader of close to $400. A little book based on interviews with Chomsky has already sold 20,000 copies. Even Arendt's neglected books, such as her life of Rahel Varnhagen, are available in Japanese, showing that publishers have sought to find every one of her books -- closer to the thoroughness of German publishing than to the far more haphazard patterns of the Anglo-Saxons. Looking through the catalogs, one sees equal comprehensiveness. A relatively small new publisher, Fujiwara Shoten, has translated much of Fernand Braudel, most of Pierre Bourdieu, nearly all of Immanuel Wallerstein, etc., etc. Started 10 years ago with 40 books a year, this is a catalog that most American university presses would envy. Yet most of these books are not easy to sell, and breaking even, even at the high Japanese prices, is not a foregone conclusion. Whoever has been in charge of selling French culture to the Japanese should be given a medal. The pride of place that publishers give French intellectual thought goes back to the 1920s, when Japan turned increasingly to the West, and authors like Romain Rolland, winner of the 1915 Nobel Prize in Literature, were translated in their entirety. But much of the postwar interest in France stems from the fact that, after the war, Paris was the ideal place for a young intellectual. Indeed, there are numerous memoirs by the Japanese who lived in France, even in such humble roles as taxi driver. The result is a comprehensive translation of French work, although American political thought and other Western entries are well represented too. How is it that Japan has managed this remarkable record? One of the younger editors at Iwanami Shoten, probably the leader of serious publishing in Japan, explained it to me this way: The postwar period, he felt, was a mixture of guilt and curiosity. Japanese intellectuals, appalled by the preceding decade of war and dictatorship, were eager to find alternative ways of thought, as well as to catch up on what the West had been doing. Starting with the invasion of Manchuria in the 1930s, Japan had lived under increasingly strict censorship and totalitarian control. So the decades that followed the occupation were years of openness and daring. The question now is whether this can be continued as the economy falters and as generations change. Whatever the future, however, the state of Japanese publishing today raises a further question: What are the lessons we can draw from it? Japanese book publishing is, at this point, still relatively prelapsarian when it comes to conglomeration. There are very large firms, such as Kodansha and Shogakukan, but, altogether, the top three firms account for less than a quarter of book sales, and most of their publishing income comes from magazines and the ever-present manga. Kodansha and Shogakukan do control 80 percent of the manga sales. Book distribution is also highly concentrated. And the first signs of globalization have shown themselves in the joint venture announced by Kodansha and Bertelsmann, the first major entry of a Western conglomerate into the Japanese and Asian market. However, representatives of Kodansha were cautious in describing how extensive it would be. New quarters have yet to be found for the joint enterprise, and the lists have not yet been established. Many publishers think the real intent of the enterprise is to create a launching ground to break into the Chinese market, although that is still an unfulfilled dream even of many Japanese publishers. Diversity is still the hallmark of Japanese publishing. Over all, there are some 7,500 publishers in Japan, of which 4,500 produce from one to 10 books a year. As Fujiwara shows, it has still been possible, even at a time of economic distress, to launch new independent and serious publishing houses. One young man who was introduced to me had just started his own tiny firm, Getsuyosha, whose first book had been Gayatri Spivak's study of postcolonial literature, a choice that very few in America or Western Europe would have dared to start with. My visit to Japan coincided with the publication of my memoir of my own publishing experience, The Business of Books, in its Japanese translation, but it was not a conventional book tour. A committee of publishers, including some from the largest companies, had banded together to invite me to come and talk to them, and in particular to their younger editors, about the problems facing intellectual publishing throughout the world. I was able to see both how committed and how concerned Japanese publishers are. Japan does not have a magic bullet. Younger people are increasingly distracted by other media. Not merely pachinko parlors but cellphones are a major drain on adolescent income, costing the average teenager some $30 a month. But what is interesting is the imaginative programs to promote reading that Japanese publishers and the education authorities have each launched. Bookstart consists of the state paying to give to every young person a number of books when they come for their early medical checkups. An increasing number of schools start the day with 10 minutes of reading: manga, Harry Potter, whatever the child wants is fine. The hope is both to quiet down an unruly classroom and give kids a taste for independent reading. Nevertheless, as promising as those projects are, they don't really address the underlying malaise, which comes from the fact that young people are less and less interested in the intellectual issues and politics of their country. The protests that marked the 1960s and 1970s are over. The Japanese students whom one once saw demonstrating in huge groups against such varied issues as the Vietnam War and the new Tokyo airport are no longer in the streets. This is a climate in which editors increasingly face profit pressures. According to the Japan Times, new books of literary fiction now sell between 1,000 and 2,000 copies, a number similar to serious fiction in other countries but down from the past. Nor, unfortunately, does the bestseller list give reason for excessive optimism. For a long while this year, a new translation of The Catcher in the Rye into the current Japanese adolescent idiom, by Haruki Murakami, was the No. 1 best seller. But today's lists are filled with business books, inspirational how-to, and the like. During my visit, the famous nine-story Sanseido bookstore in Tokyo's book district, Kanda, gave as its No. 1 best seller Stairway to Dreams, by Hitoshi Nakatani, in which "a veteran barber describes how he turned 100 fickle and capricious youths into full-fledged hairstylists." It was followed by a number of equally uninspired choices, until one reached the Salinger title, clinging to No. 10. Still, compared with what has happened to publishing in the West, the situation in Japan is extraordinarily impressive. The drive for profit has been kept in check, and has not yet limited the amount of serious publishing going on. The Japanese are still more likely to translate one of our demanding books than any other country. Part of that is because they still see publishing as a necessary conduit to what is happening in the rest of the world. And part is because they still see publishing more as a personal undertaking, an expression of a publisher's own interests, than a business. That elusive "general reader" we are all hoping to reach can still be found in Japan. But publishing is always a microcosm of the society in which it exists. The generational change and the increasing profit pressures cannot be wished away. We will have to see, as in every other field, to what degree Japan can withstand the forces of globalization and maintain its own intellectual traditions, a question that is central today to most Japanese people. André Schiffrin is director of the New Press. http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 50, Issue 14, Page B5 |
Copyright © 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education