SUSO

The second story in our Japan series explores Tokyo's book selling region of Jinbocho.

W + P / Alex Hoban

Bookshops don’t exactly scream ‘thrills and spills’ - unless of course you’re the sort left reaching for your pocket tissues after the dizzy euphoria of seeing a Jamie Oliver cookbook on sale at 10% off.

Yet Jinbocho bookseller’s district in the heart of Tokyo’s Chiyoda Ward is no ordinary book depository. In a country that produces consumable materials at an unnaturally fast rate, and is obsessed with collecting and accumulation, Jinbocho strives to archive every written word that’s ever been created by the Japanese people, in all their multifarious manifestations. 


With well over two hundred paperback traders packed tightly together along its streets, Jinbocho has the highest concentration of bookstores in the whole world. Selling everything from Tokugawa-era scrolls to plastic-wrapped 80s pop magazines; proliferate modern literary classics to obscure fetish magazines featuring girl’s showing off large sweat patches, walking around its narrow bustling alleyways, where the roof-high piles of books spill out onto the pavements, it feels like passing through a living, breathing index of every thought and feeling Japan has ever experienced.

Every year more and more bookstores are shutting, as people turn away from old print media.


Jinbocho takes its name from the great samurai Jinbo, a resident of the area in the 17th century. After the Meiji Restoration, whereby the old feudal Tokugawa shogunate was deposed to unify Japan under a new imperial court, ushering in an intense peroid of industrialistion and modernisation. The Meiji government took claim over the area and set up a handful of schools and universities, many of which remain to this day. This was the seed that spawned the modern bibliophile’s paradise, as the booksellers flocked to the doorsteps of the academic-institutions to sell their wares to the book-hungry intellectuals. These days this is reversed as the intellectuals flock to the sellers, as scholars descend upon the area after attending academic conferences in Tokyo.

Jinbocho has been the biggest book market in the world and has lived through earthquakes and World Wars. The center of Japan’s publishing industry, including the headquarters of one publishing giants Tokyodo Shoten, famous writers like Ryotaro Shiba and Seicho Matsumoto have spoken of having favourite stores, where they search avidly for old books to inspire their new stories. So important is it in the imaginations of Tokyo city dwellers both young and old that it’s even been immortalised in the world of Manga, with its own, literature-theme, futuristic crime detective series.

Taking place in an alternative future in which book publishers are the keepers of knowledge and have used it to gain global power, R.O.D. (Read or Die) follows a book-loving substitute teacher who lives a secret double life as an agent for the Royal British Library’s Division of Special Operations. Every bit as bonkers as it sounds, the main character’s flat in Jinbocho acts as the hub of her secret activity, while around her a network of organised book criminals, thieves and fraudsters try to devalue everything that’s held dear about the written word and the role it plays in maintaining a safe, operational society.


However, despite Jinbocho’s long and colourful history, not all’s well in the bookseller’s bubble. Although over 200 new books are published daily in Japan, nationwide the book market has shrunk by over 20% since 1996. Every year more and more bookstores are shutting, as people turn away from old print media and are turning their attentions to more high-tech alternatives instead. Jinbocho’s booksellers are adapting to these changes in the literary landscape by meeting them head on. A specially constructed website database (hosted here if you’re interested and can read Japanese) was launched in 2006 to catalogue all the rare and archived books and manuscripts available in the Chiyoda Ward, acting as answer to all the virtual bookstores vying for its customers.

Elsewhere, the area is diversifying beyond books, with art stands, film and music venues, and everything from theatre to sports memorabilia stores adding new annexes to this living cultural archive. ‘Project Space Kandada’ takes its name from Jinbocho’s southern area Kanda in which it is located, and the Dada cross-media movement that dominated the European avant-garde of the early the 20th century. A church to the printed face of the liberal arts, it occupies a renovated former printing warehouse and has come to stand for the dually historical yet forward thinking attitude of Jinbocho and its people. Spacious yet simple, it has a main room with a high ceiling for large installation that can be subdivided to make for a versatile, ever changing exhibition space. 
Itself constantly developing and adapting, Jinbocho marches forth through history. As it does so a record and accumulation of everything that has preceded it trails behind it.

On the counter as you enter Project Space Kandada is a small sign on which the phrase ‘Bijutsuchu’ is written in Japanese kanji characters. Meaning, ‘Art In Progress’ it perfectly encapsulates Jinbocho’s roll and significance not simply as a district of Tokyo, but as a living hub of cultural information in a constantly shifting social landscape. 


jimbou.info