In Japan, the Print Magazine Lives On
Some notes on the power of analog culture.
In Japan, the toilets are automatic, the trains are the fastest in the world, and a robot can handle the checkout at a 7-11. In movies and pop culture, the future is Japanese: Blade Runner is set in Los Angeles, but its prophetic vision is aesthetically dominated by kanji, koi fish, and the geisha. Here, there is lighting-fast transportation, the robots will serve you, and you can wash your dirty ass crystal clean without lifting a finger.
But Japan is also a nation where analog culture still rules. Fax is widely used for business communication and most payments are still made in cash. Entire districts are dedicated to the sale of cassette tapes and vinyls. And for all its bark about the future, there is no bite: In 2022, Japan was dubbed the least “digitally competitive” East Asian country.
There are also magazines. Lots and lots of magazines.
As a form of media, magazines are quickly dying, mostly due to our world’s fast pivot to the digital. I don’t think this claim needs much more verifying — when was the last time you held a magazine over scrolling on social media?
But in Japan, bookstores are full of them, as are convenience stores. And an entire town in Chiyoda-ku is dedicated to the sale of magazines. On my trip to Tokyo last week, the bookstore near my AirBnb held more than 150 titles (I tried to count but eventually stopped): magazines that ranged in form and content—stacked front and center as you walked. There were fashion bibles, design books, film criticism, and a small area where you buy the most long-standing English magazine titles too.
These magazines, interestingly, sell enough copies to sustain themselves. While most publications in the US or the UK stay afloat through ad revenue, the largest share for revenue for print media in Japan comes from the sale of the object itself.
Japan is, as one BBC Future writer argues, paper obsessed. But I’m willing to stretch this claim a little further: modern Japan would not have been made without paper and print.
Before the 17th century, Japan was a nation of disparate tribes. When the shogunate sought to unify the nation during the Tokugawa era, all the different kingdoms of before were to be brought together, made legible into one whole.
And it was print culture that did the job, historian Mary Elizabeth Berry argues in Japan in Print. Using print texts like gazettes, maps, and directories, commercial publishers widely distributed information on different areas of Japan: information on local governments and industries, as well as which cultural landmarks were found in which locales. These were the magazine’s antecedents, and they built “a core of standard information” in the 18th century where Japan was to be brought together through a single governing body. For the Japanese, there was now “common knowledge” about the nation they inhabited, and they found it in print. As Berry writes, print culture “invented for popular audiences a Japan,” framing the nation of different locales into a unified entity.
In the centuries that followed, prints helped develop Japan’s intellectual culture. During the Meiji period (often considered Japan’s Enlightenment era), Japanese scholars developed a distinct vocabulary for new ideas, going beyond mere translations of Western concepts. And they distributed this language in print. Imperial mythologies also spread through newspapers, making the once distant figure of the emperor a tangible symbol for national unity.
Within the last 50 years, prints unified how the nation dressed. Magazines like Popeye, Ginza, and FRUITS, were agenda-setting, actively Japan-ifying trends. FRUITS, for example, modernized the kimono by mixing it with punk; Popeye turned traditional American prep aesthetics on their head and somehow made it Japanese. The goal was simple: While western titles like GQ and Vogue were stuck reporting the runway, the Japanese fashion magazine created style by the Japanese, for the Japanese.
Print and paper unite — I think that’s the lesson Japanese magazines might teach us. But while the medium is still alive in Japan, it’s not certain whether it will last. Popular titles like FRUITS have folded, albeit at a slower rate than magazines elsewhere. In an age where digital media fuels political division and pushes towards more niche tastes, what would the world have lost when more magazine titles eventually die out?
Further Reading:
What’s Next for Japan’s Fashion Bibles? — Business of Fashion
Press ahead — Monocle
Oshigami — Wikipedia
