Japan has some really great bookstores, but unfortunately they have mostly been off of my radar due to my poor Japanese reading skills. I’m hoping to work on that over the next few years - actually I’m finding just by living here my reading skills have been improving.
Anyway, even if I can’t read the books cover-to-cover quite yet I can at least read the titles, so it’s still fun to browse the books. While in Kuramae (checking out Coffee Counter Nishiya) we stumbled across two book stores.
The first is Readin’ Writin’ BOOK STORE - this seems to be a very carefully curated (if not eclectic) bookstore.
As an example - my eyes were drawn to this shelf with books on specialty coffee on the right… and only a short distance away were some books on Hitler.
Other books include ones on the pain of childbirth (statistically Japan still has a very low uptake on epidurals compared to western countries) and books about Ukraine/Russia, anarchy and feminism.
The second bookstore we checked out was the Tomei Bookstore. Tomei means “transparent”, and the concept of this one is that it’s an unmanned bookstore that is open 24/7.
When we visited there was an employee working there, but otherwise you can use the self-checkout machines to buy your book.
This bookstore was originally started by a company known as “freee Group”, which writes software for small businesses - and decided to branch out into starting a small business of their own.
So compared to a regular bookstore, there were more books focused on starting businesses, e.g. a guide to the economic side of starting your own coffee shop.
One book in particular caught my eye (which I decided to buy) called “Is Coffee For Men?” by Keita Nakamura.
This seems to be a very recent release, and is also a very topical question for me. As I visit more and more specialty coffee stores and roasters in Japan, I’m realising the overwhelming majority seem to be owned and run by men. Japan doesn’t have the greatest track record on gender equality so I’ll be curious to see what the book is about.
My husband also found this one that caught his eye about what to do if people get angry at you when you are on the train (only a book that could be written in Japan, really).
They also had a mystery book section (where you don’t know what you got until you buy it and unwrap it).
Plus a shared bookshelf where individuals can own a nook and sell their own books in that section.
If you’re interested in stationery, directly across from the Tomei Bookstore is also the mt lab, a washi tape store. mt is probably the most popular brand of washi tape - if you’re not familiar, washi tape is a semi-transparent tape covered in patterns that people tend to use for scrapbooking and journalling.
They had some really cute designs, including some limited edition seasonal ones like this summer shaved ice one (so cute).
It was tempting to buy some, but I think I bought 3 rolls of tapes like 5+ years ago and I still have a lot of it left, so I’m really not much of a washi tape user.
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