Kazuyoshi Hanada, age 82, is one of Japan's highest-profile magazine editors, having held the top position at Shukan Bunshun, Marco Polo, Uno, Men's Walker and WiLL. He has also appeared as a TV commentator. Banking on his fame, in 2016 he launched his own magazine, a conservative monthly opinion magazine closely resembling WiLL named "Hanada."
Writing in his column that appears every Wednesday in Yukan Fuji (Oct 3), Hanada pours out his woes upon having seen the results of a recent opinion survey on the Japanese language undertaken by the Cultural Agency. The survey, conducted between January and March of this year, questioned 6,000 people age 16 years and above, from which 3,559 valid responses were obtained.
To the question, "How many books do you read per month?" the responses broke down as follows: None -- 62.6%; one or two -- 27.6%; three or four -- 6.0%; five or six -- 1.5%; and seven or more -- 1.8%.
The data shows a significant change from a similar survey conducted in 2008. Then, the percentage of respondents who did not read even one book per month was 46.1%. A decade later, in 2018, that figure had risen very slightly to 47.3%. Then the six years that followed saw what can be described as a spectacular crash, to the degree that presently nearly two out of three Japanese basically said they don't read books at all.
Of course, that's not to say they don't read. Among survey respondents in their 20s, 83.9% said they have opportunities to peruse "forms of data other than books" -- mainly believed to be from the internet. Among those in their 30s, the figure was even higher at 86.6%.
The change this has wrought on society, writes Hanada, can be seen by looking at the priority seats on commuter trains, where you're likely to see young adults -- their faces buried in their smartphones -- blithefully disregarding the handicapped, seniors and young mothers carrying infants for whom the seats are intended.
Hanada says on two occasions when he admonished such passengers, they became sulky and ignored him. He decided it was a hopeless quest and gave up.
"But I wish the railway companies would take the initiative and broadcast announcements requesting young people (excluding young people with a physical handicap of course) from sitting on priority seats," Hanada writes.
Back on topic, Hanada recalls some time ago when a young scholar was said to have made the claim of having read 600 books over his summer vacation.
Starting from around age 6, he wonders, how many books might a person read over the next, say, 75 years?
There was a time when typically, a businessman in Japan could be considered a "reader" if he read two books a week, or 104 a year. Starting from age 6, if a person maintained that rate over the next 75 years, the total number would come to "only" 7,800 books during their lifetime. Contrast that figure with the total number of books published in Japan each year -- around 70,000. In other words, the annual output of books each year is nearly 10 times what the average literate person will read.
According to publishing data from 2013, China topped the world with 210,000 titles published that year, followed by 180,000 titles in the US, 150,000 in the UK, 120,000 in Russia and 100,000 in Germany.
Many say that it is inconvenient to carry books on trips abroad, and Hanada concedes it is probably more sensible for a traveler to use eBooks such as Amazon's Kindle.
"I tried using one, but couldn't get the hang of it," Hanada readily admits. "When it comes to books, I like the feel of those printed on paper."
Needless to say, the decline in demand for books is having a disastrous impact on the stores that sell them.
Featured in the October issue of Tsukuru, a monthly covering Japan's mass media, Shigeru Shibazaki discusses the closing of his bookstore, Oosama Shobo, at the end of August. The shop, founded in 1967, had been the last among what had once been five bookstores adjacent to Yutenji Station in Tokyo's Meguro Ward.
It had never been a huge moneymaker.
"Monthly rent on the shop was ¥500,000," Shibazaki told Tsukuru. "If the store could turn over ¥10 million in sales, gross profits would be around ¥2 million, from which rent and salaries had to be deducted. But sales dropped from their peak of ¥10 million to around ¥3 million, which after paying the rent barely left anything for other operating costs."
Shibazaki looks back on the days when his customers displayed a voracious appetite for reading matter.
"We've been closing the store at 9 p.m., but in the old days we stayed open until 1 a.m.," he recalled. "We'd receive shipments of books around midnight, which we'd immediately unpack put out on the shelves. And even at that time customers would drop in to snatch up the latest titles.
"These days the number of commuters exiting the station from the last train of the night seem to be a lot fewer," he sighed.
© Japan Today
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