The Age of E-Books for RealP re sid e n t, V oy ag e r J ap an , I n c .

J un ko Kam ata
package were loaded onto floppy disks or CDR O Ms and sold mainly in the software sections ofelectrical appliance stores, where personal computers were just then becoming a new flagshipcategory. In essence, these expanded books weresold as if they were hardware accessories. We hada few major hits, such as the Beatles’ A Hard
Day’s Night (9 0-minute movie with synchronizedfilm script plus other features) and The Shinchō
Library 100 on CD-ROM (100 titles from the
Shinchōsha pocket paperback library), but for themost part sales were poor.

V oyager Japan, Inc. was established in 19 9 2 as acompany focused on digital publishing. Backwhen we were first getting started, people would
often ask, “ Are books on paper going to disappear?” Since print books were still growing
strongly toward their peak at the time, I could
hardly imagine such a thing, and I responded accordingly. But when I look back from the broader
perspective afforded by the present, I’m no longer
sure that was the right response. The better answer probably would have been to say that weshouldn’t assume print books will always be withus. No matter what we might be talking about,nothing in this world can be expected to last forever unless the time and effort that goes into creating and sustaining it is duly rewarded.

When the sales of CD-R O M software went into
decline, expanded books hit a wall as well. The
novelty had worn off, and the fact that they were
not portable— you had to be at a computer to readthem— had emerged as a major flaw that could
not be overcome with a simple software fix.

Print books do not break easily. But precisely because this is so, we fail to notice signs that they
are at genuine peril of being lost. Not just anyone
who wants can put out a book anymore. The commercial publishing business is experiencing disruptions in its distribution infrastructure, andthere is also a serious narrowing of genres taking
place. R ealistically speaking, to bring out print
publications requires people who will handle thephysical act of publishing, and if those people
disappear, so will the publications. It is during
this period of crisis for the business that electronic publishing has sprouted up. Let’s take a look atdevelopments in the digital book arena to date.

We were nevertheless able to keep our chins up
because a few others besides ourselves werewarming to the advantages of digital. O ne such
person was the late Michio Tomita, who foundedAozora Bunko (http://www.aozora.gr.jp/)— literally “ Blue Sky Library” — a still-growing, free Internet archive of works whose copyright terms
have expired or whose authors otherwise wish to
make their books available to the public. Whenone of his own books was pulped, he realized that
digital offered a way for authors to save theirbooks from being completely lost.

T he R ol e of D ig ital B ooks

As the Aozora archive was getting off the ground,
we also received encouragement from the visually
impaired. To them, print books were mere bundles of paper. No matter how much they ran theirfingers over the pages, the smooth sheets remained silent to them. But the text in digitalbooks was stored as bits, and those bits could be
converted to speech. “ This is how books need toWhen we first launched V oyager, we were focused on all the great things digital was going to
let us do. In 19 9 3 we released Japan’s first e-bookauthoring tool called “ Expanded Book.” The software enabled the creation of interactive digitalbooks that melded text with images, audio tracks,and video footage. Books produced with this2

has plummeted over the last ten years— from
17 ,15 3 in 2 005 to 12 ,7 9 3 in 2 014 (Shuppanbutsu

Authorhanbaigaku no jittai 2015 [Current Publication Prices 2 015 ]).

To anyone connected with the publishing industry, the declining numbers have long since become common knowledge, but the general public
remains almost completely unaware of what is
occurring. When I mention these figures to today’s college students and point out that the peak
was around the time they were born, they invariably express surprise.

Publisher
etu nsDistributor
etu nsBookstore

ReaderFigure 1: Commercial
publishing houses use
a variety of distribution
channels, but traditionallymost common is for books
to reach retail stores by wayof a distributor. In recent
years there has been a
gradual uptick in publishers
who deal directly withretailers.

Needless to say, the shrinking market has had aneffect on publishing trends. Commercial publishers are producing a consumer product. Theirbooks must sell if they are to survive. So they began giving more say to professionals who keep aclose eye on the market and can select or commission the kind of manuscripts that will do well,hoping to boost their sales figures. But this has
tended simply to reinforce subjects and authorsthat are already selling well. And when we examine the results to see whether the strategy worked,
the answer appears to be that it wasn’t that simple. And so, in the increasingly frenetic quest for
more sales, tie-ins with other media became thenext big thing. For publishers today, the most important criteria for selecting titles has become
whether a given property is suitable for adaptation to animation, live-action films, and/or television dramas.

be,” they told us. We realized that digital books
were not just about reading with our eyes. They
had a deeper, more versatile role to play.

C on v e n tion al P ub l ishin g S e e s I ts
L im its
Meanwhile, how has the world of print publishing
fared over the last twenty-odd years? The traditional book distribution system is made up of
publishers, specialized distributors, and retailers.
Finished books from all publishers are channeledthrough a small number of distributors to bookstores around the country, where they are delivered into readers’ hands (see Fig. 1). Some key
characteristics of this system are that books sellat the same price at stores throughout the country(thanks to a resale price maintenance agreement);
that the books go to retailers on consignment andcan be returned; that returned books can subsequently be shipped out to another bookstore; that
reshipped returns must be sold at the new bookprice; and that the system is local to Japan.

Some have also been trying to compensate for thedrop in sales by increasing the number of titles
they publish. In 19 6 0, 11,17 3 new books were
P int
3,000
( billion)
2,500

oo Sales i u es

sti ated Sales

ount (Pe iodicals)sti ated Sales

ount ( oo s)

2,000

Books distributed through this system reached apeak of ¥ 2 ,6 5 6 billion in sales in 19 9 6 before beginning to fall. By the end of 2 015 the market had
shrunk to ¥ 1,5 2 2 billion— a drop of more than
4 0% (see Fig. 2 ). Meanwhile, the number of publishers in Japan also fell from a peak of 4 6 12 in
19 9 7 to just 34 89 in 2 015 (Shuppan News, mid-Juneissue, 2 016 ). Similarly, the number of bookstores

1,500
1,000
500
0
’ 60

’ 65

’ 70

’ 75

’ 80

’ 85

’ 90

’ 95

’ 00

’ 05

’ 10

’ 15

Figure 2: Sales of print publications (books and periodicals together) peaked in
1996, and the market has been steadily shrinking in the years since. Based on the
Annual Report of the Publication Market 2016 published by the Research Institute for
Publications.

3

published. The annual figure increased steadily asJapan’s postwar economy boomed, and when the
publishing market peaked in 19 9 6 , the total number of new titles for the year reached 6 3,05 4 . Butinterestingly, the number of new titles continued
to edge up even as overall sales figures went into
decline, and nearly 2 0 years of falling sales later,
the number of new titles published in 2 015 was
7 6 ,4 4 5 (see Fig. 3).

T he N e tw ork Ag e
Behind these ineluctable changes lies the greatest
revolution since the industrial revolution of the
18th century: the Internet. As every book lover
must know by now, recent years have seen more
and more readers turning to online bookstores. A
number of traditional Japanese stores have established a presence on the Web— Kinokuniya withit’s own site, and aru en, Junkudō, andBunkyōdō with their oint honto. p location. But
the giant of all online bookstores is Seattle-based
Amazon of the United States, with Web stores inover a dozen other countries including Japan.

R eturn rates approaching 4 0% are also a problem.
For the majors, the cost of warehousing productthat has been returned to publisher stock reaches
hundreds of millions of yen a year. Savings canbe achieved by reducing stock, and there may beother measures that can be applied, but there arelimits. At some point, publishers conclude that
continued storage is no longer justifiable, and thebooks are destroyed.

Some of the print books sold on these Amazon
sites do not go through distributors. Amazon iswilling to deal with anyone: it does not matter
whether you are a company or an individual. All
you have to do is fill out an application at an Amazon site and agree to the terms of service. In thesame way, anyone can sell a digital book throughthe Kindle Store that Amazon operates.

The swollen number of titles, high return rates,
low unit sales, and endless bookstore closures all
suggest the distribution system that has served
the industry so well since the mid-Meiji period(186 8– 19 12 ) is breaking down. Publishers can nolonger lean on the system that has been fine-tuned
for mass production and mass consumption of
print publications on paper. The harsh realities
hold for the majors as much as for anybody else.
Many publishing houses have decided it’s no longer enough to simply get books into stores, andare experimenting with a variety of adjunct initiatives including membership systems, lectures,study groups, and more.

In addition to Amazon’s Kindle Store, other purely digital bookstores have proliferated on the Web
as well— Apple’s iBooks Store, R akuten Kobo,
Yahoo! Bookstore, Comic C’moA, BookLive! ,Kinokuniya Web Store, and LINE Manga, toname just a few of the most prominent. All can beaccessed from a smartphone to purchase, download, and read instantly no matter where you happen to be.
It was around 2 010 that reading digital books on
smartphones began to take off. Young people intheir 2 0s and 30s have grown up in an environment of easy access to video games and otherforms of digital entertainment, and they carry
their smartphones with them at all times for communicating or gathering information via the Web.
In the nine years since the Apple iPhone appeared, ownership of smartphones among this demographic group has reached over 9 0% in Japan

Copies Sold vs. Titles Published
1,000,000(thousandcopies)100(thousandtitles)Copies Sold
Titles Published

800,000

80

600,000

60

400,000

40

200,000

20

0
’60

’65

’70

’75

’80

’85

’90

’95

’00

’05

’10

(Information and Communications in Japan White Paper,
2 015 , Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications).

0’15

It is also increasingly common for paper and digital editions of new books to appear at the same

Figure 3: Even with the number of published titles rising, total sales remain on a
downward trend. Based on the Annual Report of the Publication Market 2016
published by the Research Institute for Publications.

4

time, allowing readers to choose according topreference. For digital books, the file format
known as EPUB has become the open standard
for distribution over the Internet. In O ctober
2 011, the EPUB specification was modified toenable vertical text layout and pagination, paving
the way for Japanese ebooks to be produced in
the more appealing traditional format.

The Si e o the( billion)
120

80

Publishin
Total

160

Total

a
.

et
Co icsa a ines

.

oo s
114.9
88.2

40
7

The contracts drawn up between publishers andauthors now routinely include clauses addressing
digital rights, putting the paperwork in place forevery publisher to expand into electronic publishing. Publishers make sure to lock down all pertinent rights from the start. For comics and lightnovels, simultaneous print+ digital publication has
become the norm. The result has been a jump of
30% in e-comics sales just between 2 014 and2 015 (see Fig. 4 ). With a profusion of portabledevices for reading, the proliferation of stores on
the Web, and content galore, digital publishinghas truly come into it own.

0

12.5

19.2

22.8

2014

2015

Figure 4: The Annual Report of the Publication Market published by the ResearchInstitute for Publications finally began releasing data on digital publications in 2014.
For paper, the report includes comics in the figures of books and magazines, but here
it breaks out e-comics as a separate category.

in an orderly manner for presentation to the reader.
We have long turned to books whenever we wantto learn something. Starting with picture books,
we soon advance to storybooks, textbooks andsupplements, how-to books, fiction, non-fiction,reference books such as dictionaries and encyclopedias, and more. Books have beginnings andends, and the information they contain is arranged
in a carefully considered order. Even when theytreat the same subject, they can be targeted at different levels of readers— children or adults, laypersons or specialists. All of this helps us absorb
knowledge more easily.

B ac k to B asic s
If publishers are going to take control of all rightsfrom the start, the fundamental dynamics of commercial publishing make it only natural that they
will prioritize digital versions of the genres that
sell. And the role of ebooks is then essentiallylimited to being a substitute for print books.
Some people deride this as “ print under glass,”questioning why a sheet of glass should have tocome between themselves and the pages of theirbook. The digital book market has certainly comea long way since the early days. But if ebooks areforever just print-under-glass, then all they will
be doing is cannibalizing print books. It’s a twisted and reductive understanding of the medium.
This is a critical issue for digital books.

I’ve had people come up to me and say that we
don’t need books and magazines anymore because we can find the answer to any question wemight ask by simple searching the Web for free.
But this ignores the value of books as packages.
Books are a medium that brings order to the chaos of limitless interconnected information.
At V oyager, our goal is to meld this advantage ofbooks together with the advantages of digital.
Where digital shines for books is in the egalitarian information delivery system that the Internet
offers. O n the Internet, users write blogs in placeof traditional diaries, they report on events they
are attending in real time through Twitter andFacebook, they upload their recipes to cooking
sites or their videos to Youtube. With everybody
able to participate democratically, the Internet has
become a massive repository of information. Andin turn, all that information is freely available for

The English word publish has its roots in the Latin noun popul, meaning “ people,” which became
the basis for a verb that referred to the act of informing those people. It can also refer to simply
announcing something to the public, but since theinvention of the printing press it has often meant
informing people by means of print publications.
Books are most fundamentally packages of information in which the content has been organized5

power authors to break away from the print-underglass mentality and experiment with the host of newfeatures that digital makes possible.

anyone and everyone to pull together in whatever
way they see fit.
It is from this soil that the ebooks of the future
will sprout, and they will embody both the advantages of traditional print books and the advantages of digital. The democratic nature of the Internet is crucial for this— i.e., the wishes of the individual take precedence over the inclinations of apublisher, allowing any individual to publish abook entirely on his or her own. The new challenge will be in how to break out of the frameworks established by conventional publishing.
Some ebooks will surely be closely integrated
with the Internet. For example, they will containdirect links to audio or video resources on theWeb, or they will be designed to connect with
community sites— they can be expected to reachbeyond the package and, in effect, “ join forces”
with the Internet.

But what does this mean in concrete terms? Firstand foremost, the tool must be something the author can handle himself, without the need for advanced IT skills. It also needs to be low in cost,and must facilitate easy dissemination of the bookonce it has been created. Crucial, too, is a built-in
mechanism for receiving technical support if andwhen it is needed.
V oyager’s answer to this need is Romancer(https://romancer.voyager.co.jp/), a free web service that has been in operation since July 2 014 .
Its principal users are self-publishing authors. In
the course of developing this tool, we had tomake a number of decisions about what data formats it would accept as input, and what digitalbook formats it would produce as output. If wewanted to encourage authors themselves to test
the waters of this new digital medium for theirwork, then it only made sense that the tool would
be designed to accept files from the widely used
Microsoft Word. We also decided it should accept
the PDF format. For output, we chose the EPUB
format because of its high portability across platforms and devices.

Why haven’t ebooks become like the Internet?
Why are they limited to certain genres? I don’t
think we can really celebrate until we have solved
these problems. Perhaps because I have spent
more than 2 0 years toiling away at the soil inwhat seemed to remain forever a grassless wilderness, a voice in my head keeps telling me that I
should not yet be rushing to call our efforts a success.

M e l d in g the Ad v an tag e s of D ig ital in to
B ooksThe other key requirement is a means of getting
the word out about the finished book. Commercial publishers budget substantial sums of money
for newspaper and magazine ads— several tens of
thousands of yen at the least, and more typicallyhundreds of thousand. Since most book reviews
as well as listings of new or forthcoming titles inthe “ Books” section of periodicals tend to be titles from advertisers, the ads are in effect theprice of admission, but the costs are prohibitive
for an individual.

But we have no reason to be disheartened. To
most everyone today, the Internet has become likewater or air, but it was not so many years ago that
it was more like the top of Mt. Everest— something the average person considered too difficultand completely out of reach. The advent of smartphones and social media quickly changed that,and today, use of the Internet has spread to every
corner of society. As a result, the infrastructure
problem for digital books has been solved.

The best alternative for the self-publisher is probably to take advantage of person-to-person connections. Authors can use email and social media
to deliver their books directly into the hands ofreaders. This can be done in a variety of ways.
For example, you can attach your ebook file to an
email, or if you have a personal website, you canThere are two other key requirements that need tobe addressed. One is a tool that simpli es the process of turning a manuscript into a packaged book,so that anyone and everyone can publish what isdear to them. Making that process easier will em6

provide a download button. But as attractive as
these simple methods may seem, they often leave
readers puzzling over how to actually read thebook they have acquired. If they don’t have anappropriate e-reader app on hand, all they’ve
gained after reading the email or web page is afile they don’t know what to do with. For ebooks
to succeed as books, readers need to be able toread them effortlessly.

AuthorC eatoeep no led e
Sou cea s
St on e patha e to pa ticipate suppo te eralReaders
esse e patha e to pu chase

Romancer’s answer to this problem is to produce
a unique UR L for each book that it creates. The
author simply needs to disseminate this UR L by
way of email or social media. All a reader thenhas to do to open the book is click on the UR L.
This direct link between author and reader is theshape of books to come.

Figure 5: The Shape of the Community

messages, showing his photographs on a “ Kataoka Photos” page, and he is eager to expand theways that readers can get to know him outside hisworks.
There was a time when we at V oyager were resigned to the inevitability of change and assumed
digital books would become unreadable once thehardware moved on. In spite of all the love andcare we put into producing them, our early efforts
essentially vanished like bubbles on the water.
But those painful experiences are now a thing of
the past.

F rom O n e Author an d O n e R e ad e r to
C om m un ity
In closing, I’d like to describe a digital publishingendeavor V oyager has been advancing since July
2 015 : the digitization of bestselling author Yoshio
Kataoka’s complete works. Including such wellknown titles as Surō na bugi ni shitekure (MakeIt a Slow Boogie), re no ōtobai, kanojo no shima (My Motorbike, Her Island), and Mein t ma
(Main Theme), the number of works digitized has
now passed the 2 00 threshold. Since the electronic versions are being created in the order of original publication, the current list presents an arrayof hip 19 7 0s and 19 80s stories featuring motorcycles and surfing and the American culture of thetime. The collection can be accessed at http://kataokayoshio.com.

The Internet now reaches into every corner of ourlives. As film cameras gave way to digital cameras, as horse-drawn carriages gave way to automobiles, once people become used to an environment in which books can be acquired instantly,
they’re not likely to give it up. The same for anenvironment in which anyone who wants to caneasily publish a book entirely on their own. Thereis simply no reason for anyone to do without
these new freedoms.

As work on the project progressed, we built out
the site with an eye to letting readers experience
the author and his complete work “ in the round.”A young staffer launched the “ Yoshio Kataoka
Essays 36 5 ” feature, and we have established away for readers to register and participate as supporting members as well. The website is becoming the focal point for a whole new community.

J un ko Kam ata (19 5 7 – ) worked at Pioneer
LDC, where she was involved in bringing theLaserDisc to market as well as in producing
multimedia content, before helping foundV oyager Japan in 19 9 2 . She has produced CDR O Ms and web content, and has also been
engaged in the development and sale ofelectronic publishing tools. She was named
president of V oyager Japan in O ctober, 2 013.

In the past, readers simply went out and bought
one of the author’s books. But the Internet brings
authors and readers closer together (see Fig. 5 ).
Author Kataoka is very open, accepting birthday
7The Chrysanthemum and the Kitty-Cat:
Can the “Kawaii” Replace the “Katana”?
V ic e P re sid e n t of Al tJ ap an C o. , L td .

M atthe w Al t
A V e ry C ute B attl e ship

et ever since American black ships sailed in to
successfully open Japanese harbors to the worldin 185 3, the relationship has also been fraught
with misunderstandings.

The JDS K irishima of Japan’s Second Escort Flotilla is a state of the art fighting ship. A guided
missile destroyer equipped with the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System, she defends herself
with a pair of Phalanx close-in defensive cannons
and four Mk 36 SUBR O C chaff launcher systems.
I know this because, being onboard as part of
Fleet Week 2 015 festivities, a bunch of super-cutemascots are explaining it to me. Posted on a gray,armored wall is a peculiar poster. It anthropomorphizes the ship’s defensive systems as cute characters with warmly smiling faces. “ I’m Chaffy,
the Kirishima’s unof cial image character (https://

In 19 4 6 , anthropologist R uth Benedict published
The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. Written
during World War II, it aimed to analyze and predict the ine plicable behavior of Japanese during wartime. Although its methodology is dated
by modern standards, it proved hugely influential
both in its home country and in Japan after the
war ended. As the crest of the royal family, thechrysanthemum has long symbolized Japanesepatriotism and tradition. In Benedict’s era, it was
paired with the sword, as Japan used militarymight to expand its “ East Asia Co-Prosperity
Sphere, with disastrous results. But times havechanged. Benedict would not recognize the Japanof today, where the only swords being crossed arethose wielded by the samurai heroes, giant robots,
and fighting bishojo of anime and manga fantasy.

pbs.twimg.com/media/CQ6 8Q2 EV AAACKEg.jpg:large)

The chaff rounds are illustrated with a cute pon,pon sound effect. To a Westerner, this is a very
confusing combination. Cute characters juxtaposed with the context of intercepting enemy
warheads before they rip through this warcraft’s
armored hull. Even the drawings of enemy missiles are smiling. It’s hard to imagine how Japancame to see war this way, only seventy years aftera vicious battle in the Pacific. My own grandfather served on a battleship then, the USS
Alabama. I wonder what he would have thought
about all of this.

W

hat’ s U p w ith C ool J ap an ?
For in the postwar era Japan projects itself not
militarily but economically. In the Seventies andEighties, this took the form of manufacturing
might, as protectionist trade treaties combinedwith homegrown ingenuity allowed Japanese automotive and electronics manufacturers to flourish and dominate marketplaces throughout theworld. In recent years, as manufacturing has
shifted out of Japan to China and other Asian
countries, this might increasingly takes the formof entertainment products – in essence, what theAmerican political scientist Joseph Nye famously
called “ soft power.

Japan and the United States are deeply intertwined historically, politically, and economically.
O nce adversaries, then fierce rivals locked in an
economic competition during the Eighties, today
the US-Japan alliance is described by the Department of State as the “ cornerstone of U.S. security
interests in Asia with a combined diplomatic impact that resonates not just regionally, but globally. A controversial revision of the U.S.-Japan Defense G uidelines in summer 2 015 only served tostrengthen the ties between these economic titans.

What is power? In the context of a relationship it
8

is the ability to bend the behavior of others toyour will. In a diplomatic context this means using economic incentives, or military force. By thelatter standard, at least, Japan is weak, being almost wholly dependent on the United States for
its international security. But in the deeply interconnected information society of the modern
world, the real power does not come from thesword. It is mindshare. It is about causing others
to do things because they want to, because they
are moved or charmed. It is about manipulating
image and shaping perception. Japan may neveragain engage in a military offensive beyond its
borders, but it has been waging a “ charm offensive there for decades.

Wachovskis and Quentin Tarantino are open
about the influence of Japanese pop culture on
their creations.
Today the Japanese government has a name forthis effect. They call it Cool Japan. Although
the term had been a buzzword for years, it became reality in 2 013 as part of a 10 trillion yen
economic stimulus package, part of which
launched the Japan Brand Fund — “ an organization to fund and support business activities to cultivate overseas demand for Japan’s attractive
products and services. It’s too early to say if thisinitiative will be successful, or yet another example of politicians wasting money to make it seemas though they are doing something. But for the
moment, it is clear that the Japanese governmentis dedicating significant resources to capturing
hearts and minds abroad.

Ironically, only recently has this been recognizedand embraced by Japan’s political rulers. For
many years, Japanese creators operated with only
the domestic market in mind, and little concern as
to how their creations would be perceived abroad.
Although a handful of productions did make itinto foreign markets with varying degrees of success, the efforts in English-speaking nations atleast were scattershot. Translations were usuallyleft entirely in the hands of the foreign agents
who acquired the rights to a property. This often
led to amusing locali ations such as the absurdly rapid-fire dialog of Speed Racer, or the wholesale changing of characters and plots in an attempt to camouflage the origin of the material.

Ironically, this push arrived at a time when thecontent coming out of Japanese studios is lesspalatable to foreign audiences than ever before.
Japanese popular culture is currently dominatedby se uali ed, infantili ed lolitas that makemany foreigners uncomfortable. There are illustrated forms, such as the Combined F leet G irls
Collection, and real-life forms, such as the group
AKB4 8. A great shift has occurred in Japanese
tastes, away from the macho heroes and ferocious
monsters of old; away from the hard towards thesoft; away from the masculine towards the feminine. In other words, away from the sword.

In spite of this, Japanese pop culture started having a mysterious impact on the rest of the world.
This first became apparent in the US during theighties, an era of Japan bashing that sometimes took literal form, with infuriated autoworkers smashing Japanese cars with baseball bats inprotest. While the grown-ups got angry about imported cars, their kids thrilled to a wholly different type of import: Japanese comic books (Akira),animation (Macross), toys (The Transformers),
and movies (G odzilla) made inroads into the popular consciousness of young Americans. In theearly 19 9 0s, the trend accelerated with the rise of
the Japanese videogame industry, led by Nintendo
and a handful of rivals. By the early 2 000s, young
people raised on this multimedia diet of Japanese
pop culture grew into adults who began creating
their own; top Hollywood directors such as the

C ute n e ss as P ow e r
If the macho, the hard, the masculine contributed
to Japan’s mindshare abroad in the late 2 0th century, what, then, symbolizes Japanese soft power inthe 2 1st century? I believe the kitty, namely Hello
9

Kitty and her kind. Japan’s cute mascots are powerful symbols of an often discussed but rarely analyzed facet of Japanese culture: kawaii.

da professor wrote that “ Japan has developed amechanism to avoid facing up to its wartime history: It has neutralized issues that are too painful
to deal with by rendering them purely aesthetic,
and harmless — by making them cute. (http://

The literal definition is cute, but doesn’t neatly
overlap with Western uses of the word. In its
most obvious manifestation it is a visual shorthand, using simplified lines, rounded shapes, exaggerated eyes, proportional deformations, anddeliberate imperfections to convey a sense ofchildish, often feminine purity and innocence.
But what started simply as a style to appeal toconsumers has grown so ingrained that it has
transformed into the equivalent of a Photoshop
filter that can be applied to nearly anything. Understanding this filter, cracking this code, is key
to unraveling the paradoxes Japanese culture often presents to outsiders. Kawaii is the “ dark matter of Japanese pop culture, infusing everythingfrom best-selling comics and animation to idolgirl singing groups. Its power is harnessed not
only by entertainment creators but those in positions of authority, ranging from the municipalities
and government agencies that create cute mascots
for outreach and PR , all the way up to the Japan
Self-Defense Forces. Japan is re-envisioning itself as a kawaii nation.

www.nytimes.com/2 014 /03/13/opinion/kato-from-annefrank-to-hello-kitty.html?_ r= 1)

This is definitely one way of looking at the situation. But I’m not so sure it is the right interpretation. I didn’t get the sense any of the JSDF members I interacted with that day took their duty, or
the concept of war, lightly. And it is a fact thatkawaii mascots play a key role as mediators inJapanese society, popping up whenever there issomething uncomfortable to discuss. This happens everywhere: street signs telling people what
not to do, pharmacies using cute characters to advertise medicines for embarrassing ailments, eventhe tax office discussing how to file taxes. Cute
imagery catches peoples’ attention and makes
them concentrate on things they’d rather not think
about. And so I don’t see it as harmful, because
the military truly is something Japanese people
should be thinking deeply about.
In my opinion, the time to get worried isn’t whenthe military uses kawaii characters; it’s when theystop using them. That would mean that Japanesesociety had made its peace with the military’srole. And even though I deeply respect the men
and women who serve in it, I hope the day Japanis comfortable with the military never comes. Because I don’t ever want Japan – or any country,
including my own – to ever be comfortable about
sending troops into war.

Even having lived in Japan for the past decade, I
was unaware as to the depth of the phenomenon
until I visited the K irishima and other Japanese
warships during Fleet Week in 2 015 , where I encountered a great deal of kawaii imagery. It turns
out that not only the maritime but also the groundSDF use kawaii characters; the ground SDF deployed Cobra attack helicopters adorned withcute anime girls in a public exhibition that same
year. Japan is home to one of the world’s premiermilitaries, equipped with state of the art submarines, fighter jets, missile defense systems, andcarriers, all of it backed by an even more powerful Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security
Between Japan and the United States. There havebeen many forms of armed forces throughout human history, but the JSDF has managed to become the world’s first cute one.

Photo © Dan Szpara

There are many different ways to view thisstrange juxtaposition of the cute and the military.
In a 2 014 essay for the New York Times, a Wase10

M atthe w Al t is V ice President of AltJapan.
A native of Washington, D.C., Matthew has
been working as a professional translator andfreelance writer since the early 19 9 0s. Histranslation experience includes four years as
an in-house technical Japanese translator for
the United States Patent and Trademark
O ffice. He is the co-author of numerous
books about Japan, and a contributor to
CNN, Wired Magazine, Slate Magazine, theIndependent, Newsweek Japan, the Japan
Times, the New Yorker, and many otherpublications.

The Overseas Challenge
Author

TaiyōFujii

MyFirstOverseasEdition

used in mainland China.

When I began writing G ene Mapper, I thought of
the friends and acquaintances I wanted to read it.
This included friends overseas, who I wanted to
be able to read it in English and Chinese as well.
I hoped they would then tell their friends how
good it was, and my audience could expand byword of mouth.

In due course, Ji yin she ji shi, the Chinese translation of G ene Mapper, went on sale throughTung’s Wanderer Digital Publishing and other independent ebook outlets in Taiwan, and it subsequently went on sale through the ebooks store
Tang Cha on the mainland as well. (Amazon had
yet to bring Kindle to China at the time, and still
has not brought it to Taiwan.)

The first hurdle, which was to get the book translated, would be high enough, but I was also awarefrom the difficulties my previous employer had
encountered in the import and export of softwarethat the next hurdle would be even higher. There
are two crucial conditions for successfully crossing the language barrier with any kind of media
content. O ne is for the content to be fully localiz ed by a native speaker of the target language.
The other is to find an advocate who will help get
it into the hands of users. No matter how good abook or other product may be, you can’t simply
produce an English or Chinese edition, put it on asales table in the target country, and expect it totake off. So for a novel, I needed to find both alocal translator and a local publisher to workwith.

For the first hurdle of getting the book translated,
Tung hired a translator with a strong backgroundin Japanese anime and video games who goes by
the pen name of Wenli Kagurazaka. I’m surethere were many challenges in producing thetranslation, but since I’m not conversant in Chinese myself, I’m in no position to comment on its
finer points. When I later had the opportunity tomeet Wenli, he mentioned that the double negatives we use in Japanese had been tricky to deal
with, and it made me wish all the more that I
could read the Chinese text. I also cringed a little,
since I know that double negatives are not considered good style for writers even here in Japan.
At any event, I was able to self-publish a Chinese
edition of my book with relative ease, and ac-

Fortunately, I was able to quickly find a contact
for Chinese. V oyager Japan’s Masaaki Hagino,whom I’d gotten to know at a book fair, put me intouch with an ebooks publisher in Taiwan named
Bobby Tung. Tung’s resumé included a stintworking as an editor in Japan, and he was also familiar with the ins and outs of vertical-text
EPUBs, where there continued to be gaps between specification and reality, so he was the perfect man to partner with on a publication that was
to be in vertically formatted Chinese. And once I
had a manuscript in the traditional Chinese characters used in Taiwan, it could be converted moreor less automatically to the simplified characters

Web page for the traditional-character Chinese edition of Gene Mapper on the
Wanderer site.

11cording to the royalty reports I’ve received, it hasreached at least several hundred new readers as aresult. The existence of this self-published edition
has unfortunately prevented publication of a commercial Chinese edition based on the expanded
G ene Mapper: F ull B uild brought out in Japan by
Hayakawa Shobō, but having been able to crossborders with my work in this way gives me a lasting sense of achievement.

Self-PublishinginEnglishGoesonHold
Thanks to Bobby Tung, self-publishing a Chinese
edition went off without a hitch, but my efforts todo the same with an English edition did not meetwith the same success.
I knew from the start that English was the mostimportant language to work on. O nce you have an
English version, it improves the chances for readers of other languages to learn about the book,and it can be used as a marketing tool. This is especially true in Asia, where titles hailing from theEnglish world have an overwhelming advantage.
From a sales perspective, they often actually prefer secondhand translations from an English edition over translations from the original.

Like anywhere else, an effort to reach mainland
China calls for finding somebody local to smooth
the way. As I’m sure my readers are aware, thecountry is known for its censorship of books
deemed to be harmful to the state. This September I have been invited to attend the Seiun Prizeceremony to be held in Beijing, and in conjunction with that, I was asked to submit a story to be
carried in the magazine K e huan shi jie (Science
Fiction World). I decided to suggest two different
titles.

But translating a book into English is expensive.
I quickly learned that having G ene Mapper rendered into English would cost around ¥ 3 million(about $ 30,000). I decided to look for a native
English translator on a job-matching site.

The first, a story called Kōsei-teki sentō kihan(Fair Battle Standards) that had appeared in the
Keikaku tō Tribute anthology, was one I prettymuch knew would be rejected, and my expectations turned out to be right. The main character isthe son of a student who was exiled to X injiang(Shinjang) in far-western China for having participated in the Tiananmen Square protests of 19 89 .
The son is involved in fighting for control of the
Qinghai-Tibet R ailroad against terrorists seeking
the independence of East Turkistan. The editor
laughed and said, “ Not a chance. It’s like you’retrying to see how many censorship trigger words
you can string together in a single row.”

In talking about publishing in English, it always
surprises me when people ask, “ Wouldn’t it bebetter to find a Japanese translator who truly understands the original?” The plain and simple answer is no. It would be utterly foolish. The output
you are looking for is a novel written in English,
which means you want a translator with the samelanguage skills as someone writing original novels in English— preferably someone who lives ina culture where English has deep roots as the language of literature.

As I said, I never actually expected to see Kōsei-teki sentō kihan translated into Chinese, but
one Chinese author I shared this anecdote withtold me that all I needed to do was make a few
changes. There are apparently any number oftranslated works that have gotten into print eventhough they present the Communist Party in apoor light. Sometimes all it takes is to change“ China” to “ Country C,” or to mechanically replace all the place names with places in V ietnam.
O f course, we outsiders have no way of knowing
such things. There’s simply no substitute for having someone local as our guide.

For this reason, even though I felt a little badabout being so cut and dried, I automaticallyruled out anybody from Singapore, the Philippines, and India. There are a large number of Japanese-English translators registered from thesecountries, among whom there may well be some
excellent literary stylists, but I had to assume thechances were very small. I also ruled out translators from the United States, England, Australia,
and New Z ealand, where the existence of translators’ associations made it unlikely I’d find someone willing to take the job on at an affordable
rate.

12

This obviously limited my options. Since some
Finnish and Norwegian authors write in English,
I considered translators from those countries, but
I couldn’t find any who knew Japanese. Then I
happened upon an Irish translator who apparently
made his bread and butter with pharmaceuticaltranslations but also mentioned on his blog that
he was a fan of Philip K. Dick. I decided to contact him, and he turned out to be traveling in Central America. He had a certain Bohemian air thatappealed to me.
From Panama, he agreed to my terms of paying
half of the translator fee up front and the rest as
royalties from sales. All of our negotiations wentsmoothly, and his draft arrived on schedule, but
unfortunately I was experiencing some health issues due to overwork and didn’t have the time togo over the manuscript carefully. Partly for thatreason, and partly because I had not yet found a
way to promote the English edition, I asked to put
the project on hold.

The English edition of Gene Mapper, translated from Hayakawa Shob ’s print editionand published by U.S.-based Haisaksoru in 2015.

TwoRequestsfrommyEnglish
LanguagePublisher
hen Hayakawa Shobō published a commercial
print edition of G ene Mapper: F ull B uild, it
opened up new possibilities for getting my bookinto English. I had opportunities to speak with anumber of different publishers, but I was given
pause when two of them expressed the same concern: that a story line extolling the open source
movement and associated business models bornon the West Coast might fall flat among American
readers to whom such things had become old hat.
It stung a little to hear this, but they had clearlygiven the book a serious look, and I was gratefulfor that.

I remain in touch with this translator today, evenafter a different English version has appeared
from Haikasoru in San Francisco. Although I regret that his translation never saw the light of day,I remain grateful for his efforts on my behalf andthe best wishes he sent my way. At least to my eyes,
the translation appeared to be well done, and I’mquite sure it would have entertained my friends. But
I simply couldn’t see my way clear to pushingahead without someone in place to promote thebook for me. Even if I could upload it to an ebook
sales site and post a few ads to catch the attentionof a reader or two, the book would just get buried
without someone committed to advocating for it.

Thankfully, Haikasoru, an imprint of V iz Mediain San Francisco, still wanted to publish the book.
The translation work by Jim Hubbert proceededon schedule, and once they had seen the firstdraft, my editors came to me with two requests.

This year I learned of a case where a science fiction author writing in Spanish produced his own
English edition, then had a native English author
edit it before self-publishing. But even though it’sa good story and he’s been promoting it quite aggressively, he can’t get any English reviews. O n
the one hand, the strategy of having a native English writer polish a draft translation I produce
may be something I’d like to try sometime, perhaps with something for an online magazine. But
more fundamentally the example serves to underscore the importance of having a locally based
marketer for any independent book.

O ne was to change at least one of the characters’
names. In the original dialogue, I had naturally
followed the Japanese custom of addressing or referring to people by surname plus -san most of
the time, but in the English dialogue this had virtually all been converted to first names, and in the
narrative passages characters were referred to byjust their surnames— all according to English custom. The problem that surfaced in this process isthat many of the R omanized names looked too
much alike.

13

thing but equal, but I realized from reading thetranslation that this wasn’t true. For all I know, thedeletion may actually have been a purely practicalmatter, since in English you often have to use heor she to refer to characters, and it’s dif cult tohide their gender even when it can remain ambiguous in Japanese. But seeing this change made me
realize other potential implications.

O nce I saw the manuscript, I couldn’t help but
agree. Three of the main characters were Kurokawa, Kitamura, and Kaneda— all beginning with K
and ending in a. The protagonist Hayashida ended
in a as well. So I changed Kitamura to Yagodoh,
and added a bit of interior monolog when Hayashida first hears the name.
The second request was to add an epilogue. My
editors were apparently under the impression that
G ene Mapper was going to have a sequel, andthey wanted the story to end with some hooks forthat sequel. It’s true that at less than 2 30 pages,
G ene Mapper is on the short side for an entertainment novel in trade paperback format. By comparison, sci-fi author Paolo Bacigalupi’s The indup G irl is 35 0 pages, and his The ater Kni e is384 pages. Based on length, it’s hardly surprisingthat someone might assume there was going to be
more to the story, and in fact, I did have someideas along those lines percolating. So I took thescene I’d been thinking of as a prologue for the
next installment and wrote it up as an epilogue
for the English translation. I think the addition
enhances the ending and makes for a more satisfying read. I’m now looking for an opportunity to
publish the Japanese version of this epilogue
somewhere as well.

Impressed as I was upon first reading Hubbert’stranslation, I later had an experience that mademe realize it was even more skillful than I had
thought. Last summer, as I practiced reading a
passage out loud in preparation for a public reading at a San Francisco bookstore, I noticed another value-added quality of the translation: the sentences had a pleasing rhythm to them, and thepages seemed to sing. Hubbert had chosen his
words for how well they sounded together.
I learned a great deal from Jim Hubbert’s English
version of G ene Mapper, and I couldn’t be happier to have had him as my translator.
The bottom line is that you ideally want to look
for a translator who is better at novels than an actual novelist.

TheImportanceofInternationalization

WhatILearnedfromtheEnglish
Translation

After reading this translation of my work rendered by a better writer than myself, I resolved in
the future to consciously work at creating stories
that would translate well. I knew it wouldn’t beeasy, but it was a guiding principle suggested by
my previous occupation.

These were the two specific requests I received
for changes to the manuscript, but Jim Hubbert
had also corrected numerous slip-ups and infelicities in the original. Since this was my first novel
and it was originally self-published, I suppose it’s
not too surprising that it contained mistakes. I
was unformed as a writer, and my skills were still
wanting. The translation clearly distinguishednarrative from interior monologue, and it had removed or merged repetitious material. There werequite a few places where I thought, “ That’s exactly how I would do it myself now” — and it gave
me a sense of how far I’d come.

When you’re engaged in software development, if
you want your product to be viable overseas, youneed to be thinking about both internationalization and localization. In this context, “ localization” refers to the process of translating thestrings that appear in menus and dialogs as well
as setting up a local sales network in the target
region, while “ internationalization” refers to designing the product from the ground up to facilitate localization in as many languages as possible. This is done through such means as storing
the strings separately from the program code inan easily-swapped resource, setting the internal
character coding to Unicode, and making sure theNot all of the alterations made me feel so good.
In one scene the protagonist expresses surprisethat a person he’s been working with at a distanceis a woman, but this was missing from the translation. I never thought I had treated women as any14

program doesn’t do things that conflict with thelanguage-handling of the operating system or web
browser environment in which it is to run. It’s notsexy work, but if you don’t do it right at the basic
design stage, you end up having a much harder
time when you get to the localization stage.

and it’s interesting to note that for the most part
they echo what Japanese readers have said of thework. They praise the lifelike realism of my settings, they like how I’ve mixed augmented reality
and genetic recombination, they couldn’t stopturning the pages, and so on. The similarity applies to the negative comments as well, such asthat the characterizations are thin or the dialogue
is flat.

Localization for literature is much the same, encompassing both the work of translating the text
and the publisher’s marketing efforts. But how
about internationalization: are there things the author can do at the original writing stage to prepare the way for localization?

Besides offering another testimony to the qualityof Hubbert’s translation, I suppose this implies
that my efforts at internationalization can becalled a success.

I believe there are. O n a macro level, he canchoose universal themes and create works thatstand on their own. O n a micro level, he canstrive for consistency of style.

PromotingMyBookintheUnitedStatesTo help promote the English edition of G ene
Mapper, I decided to attend Worldcon 7 3, held in
August 2 015 in Spokane, Washington. With mypublisher Haikasoru making the arrangements, I
stopped in San Francisco to hold a reading at
Borderland Books on my way there.

It’s easy to see the link between universal themes
and internationalization. The sorrows and suffering associated with death or the joys associatedwith having a child are the same the world over.
But I think I need to elaborate on what I mean by“ works that stand on their own.” The idea here isthat the more self-contained a work is so that it
can be enjoyed in isolation, the more easily it cancross language barriers. For example, I avoid using references to other literature for any key purpose, and I don’t quote poets and critics and such.
I may mention that music is playing, but I don’tname any specific tune. O ne reason, of course, isthat there is relatively little occasion for suchthings in science fiction, but the larger consideration is that borrowing from someone else’s work
to trigger an emotional response is likely to havea different effect on readers of different ages andcultures. I suppose I might do it if I thought I
could wrap the borrowed material in sufficiently
powerful prose to overcome any such unpredictability, but if I have that much confidence in myown prose, what do I need to borrow someone
else’s words for? Needless to say, no work can becompletely divorced from its context, but I thinksteering clear of elements that link closely to context can enhance the work’s independence, andthat should make the language barrier easier tocross.

R eadings aren’t so widely known in Japan, butthey are a common way to promote books in the
United States. My Japanese readers may haveseen examples in movies. I sat at a table in one
corner of the store and read from the opening section of G ene Mapper, and then also the passage
where the hacker Yagodoh appears in the form ofa dog. As I mentioned above, Jim Hubbert’stranslation read very well when I was practicing,and even without being a native speaker, I felt I
was able to do it reasonable justice by paying
close attention to the punctuation.
It’s important to understand that readings like thisare not merely catering to existing fans. They’re away of promoting the book to new readers. The
hope is to engage the interest not just of those
who’ve sat down in the chairs to listen but also of
those browsing the shelves nearby. After finishing
the reading, I remained at the table for quite awhile to talk with audience members and sign
books when asked. It basically took up the entire
afternoon.

G ene Mapper has generated a great many reviewson Amazon and G oodreads in the United States,

From there I proceeded on to Worldcon, where I
participated in several panels, held another read15

AndThentotheWorldI ended up spending all of my earnings from theEnglish edition on airfare and lodging, but I’m already beginning to see some returns. The English
version of my “ V iolation of the TrueNet Security
Act” was selected for inclusion in The est Science iction o the ear by its editor Neil Clarke,
whom I got to know at the conference. The lasttime a sci-fi story by a Japanese author appearedin an English “ Best of” anthology was apparently
Suga Hiroe’s “ Freckled Figure” in the year 2 000.
At the Worldcon booth for the online magazine Lightspeed. An English translation of
the short story “Violation of the TrueNet Security Act” first appeared on Lightspeed,
and was then selected for inclusion in Clarke’s The Best Science Fiction of the Yearanthology.

I have been invited to participate in a literary festival in Singapore this November by sci-fi author
Ken Liu, whom I also met at Worldcon. And thegroup that invited me to the Seiun Awards in China includes several people I spoke with at Worldcon as well.

ing, and sat around coffee tables chatting with
American sci-fi writers. My biggest shock camewhen I participated in an improv session withsome cyberpunk, horror, and other sub-genre authors. In just three minutes, we were supposed toscript a skit that in some way represented our particular sub-genre, to be acted out with three members of the audience. I didn’t manage to come up
with anything, but the others put together roughly
five-minute skits in the allotted time, and performed them admirably with the help of audience
members. I felt I learned something new about
just how closely drama and literature arelinked— a link that my English-speaking colleagues were already thoroughly conversant inand could handle as easily as breathing air.

I don’t intend to let opportunities like this slip
through my fingers, and there is no doubt in mymind what I need to do: Write stories on universal
themes that will stand on their own. Travel toeach location and promote my books like any ordinary author, meeting my fans and getting toknow other authors and editors. I can think of noother way to set myself up for the encounter thatwill lead to my next great leap forward.
I was already 4 3 when I made my literary debut,
so I have no time to waste. Twenty or so more
years is all I can count on for having the energy
to produce fully realized works of weight andsubstance. I already know that’s not enough time
to write all of the story ideas I have floatingaround in my head.

The week I spent rubbing shoulders and sitting
around tables talking shop with so many seasoned
writers was a true joy— so much more than theword “ rewarding” can express. I tried to interact
with people as just another ordinary writer. When
you’re overseas in a place like that, it’s meaningless to tell people you’re from Japan. Attendees
had gathered from all over— from Alabama and
Los Angeles, from China, and even from war-torn
Syria. It’s true that Japan is known for producing
wonderful anime and manga, but that has nothing
to do with me. By simply repeating that “ I’m here
to promote a new cyberpunk title called G ene
Mapper that’s probably different from anything
you’ve read before,” I came away having madeenough friends that I’m eager to go back to
Worldcon again this year.

I guess that means I never need to worry about
running out of material.
TaiyōFujii (19 7 1– ) became a publishingsensation in 2 012 when he self-published theebook G ene Mapper. An expanded G ene
Mapper: F ull B uild came out the following
year from Hayakawa Shobō in both print andelectronic editions. His 2 014 novel bitaru
kuraudo (O rbital Cloud) was awarded the
2 014 Japan SF G rand Prize and the 2 015
Seiun Japanese Novel Prize. He currently
serves as the 18th president of the Science
Fiction and Fantasy Writers of Japan.

16How Shōdo Island’s Online Cultural Magazine
On the Boat Was Born
M e d ia P rod uc e r

Kim iko H iran omost important tool for a move like this.

W

ith the I n te rn e t, I C an L iv e
An y w he re

Of course, there’s no getting around the fact thatthings are different when you move to a tiny outlying island. Convenience changes to inconvenience, stress turns to ease, estrangement gives
way to intimacy, and simplicity becomes true lu ury. y husband who was easygoing to begin
with has become even more so, rising early in themorning to work on his hand lettering and cover
designs, then spending leisurely hours playing
with the cat, pulling weeds in the garden, becoming an e pert bonfire builder, and so forth—paying little heed to the day of the week, and so lostin his own little bubble of tranquility that I suspect he’d be diagnosed with dementia if he were
to take a memory test. By contrast, I’m a late riser and, never able to get enough of the people andthings that make up island life, spend my days
busily rushing this way and that, then stay up into
the wee hours chatting with my new friends overdrinks. ith one such day giving way to another,
our native Tokyo has steadily faded into the distance.

Two and a half years ago I moved to Shōdo Island(Shōdoshima), located in the middle of the Seto
Inland Sea, with my husband Kōga Hirano, who
designs book covers.
People ask me what made me decide to move andwhy I chose Shōdo Island, but I’ve never beenable to give a particularly clear answer. I do remember thinking I wanted to get far away from
Tokyo after having effectively squandered all ourresources in a little-theater venture, but we could
have gone pretty much anywhere, and beyond
that, my sense is that it was mostly ust a vague
impulse. I’ve always been better at doing than
thinking, so I tend to act first and ask questions
later, and in this case, too, any e planations I
might give at this point are essentially e post
facto. All I can really say is that one thing led toanother and the ne t thing we knew the two of us
getting on into what’s known as old age had settled into being Shōdo-islanders—with never adull moment thanks to the cadre of much younger
folks surrounding us. I do regret—though perhaps
not too terribly much—the way my own impulsive choices keep turning my husband’s life upside down, but I suppose he’ll ust have to shrug
it off as another in a 50-year string of bad harvests.

A L if e - S iz e d S n ap shot of the I sl an dhen we left our lifelong home behind, I had envisioned a quiet life of retirement on the island,tending to my plants like Shōdo’s own enetia
Stanley-Smith, and I swore to myself that I would
keep out of trouble. But to my surprise I soon
found myself organi ing events with the young
people, acting as a counselor to others contemplating a move, helping out at the town hall, planning e hibitions, and so on, unable to reign in mynatural inclination to stick my nose in, unable toresist lending an ear. On the day I write thesewords, we are scheduled to hold Shōdo Island’s
first evening of rakugo entertainment (comic storytelling in the classical style).

There is one thing I can say for certain, though if
it weren’t for the Internet, I’d never have beenable to move so far away, especially to a remoteisland. e owe it to the Internet that my husband
has been able to carry on with his book design
work as if nothing has changed, and that I’ve
been able to continue with my own writing andevent planning as well. It’s without question the17make of—and everything in between. hen I’dread them all through, I found myself clutching
my head at ust how difficult it is to relate something to others through writing.

In a nutshell, I was inspired by the high energy
level of the island’s irrepressible young people,
who seemed to be driven by something far removed from economic motives or the pursuit of
personal profit. Seeing the gusto with which they
threw themselves not ust into their livelihoods
but also into finding diversions, pooling their respective skills and all pitching in together tomake things happen, was like a shot in the arm.
And so that nasty little habit I have of sticking
my neck out and putting everything on the line
reared its head once again I decided to get involved and do as much as I could for as long as I
still had the strength.

So this was my starting line, but how was I to begin
In cases where I thought the authors could revise
their own work, I asked them to do so, this time
giving them specific parameters for length. or
the others, I went back over the manuscripts one
by one, picturing the author and what I’d come toknow of him or her in my mind as I edited, cutting e cess, adding little bits here and there,
swapping out material, and making other changes.
ith manuscripts flying repeatedly back andforth between myself and the editor in Tokyo, it
wasn’t until near the end of 2015 that I could see
the shape of the whole. inally, in ebruary ofthis year, the book came out with the title Oideyo, Shōdoshima (Come to Shōdo Island).

It first hit me that I could put together a book thatwould be a life-si ed snapshot of the island andits people—e cept presented entirely in thosepeople’s own voices rather than my own. hen I
ran the idea by an editor I’d worked with in Tokyo, he encouraged me to give it a whirl. I suspect he actually thought nothing would come ofit, but I was nevertheless heartened by his response. It gave me a renewed link with my native
Tokyo. y ne t step was to ask 17 young people
to write about their work or about a particular
event that they had had a role in, urging them tosimply write whatever came to mind in whatever
way seemed appropriate. Over the ne t year, Kaumi Obika, an artist living in Takamatsu on theisland of Shikoku, drew illustrations of how
things work at seven local production sites. hen
the manuscripts began arriving from my 17 writers, they turned out to be all over the map, from abrief half-page statement to a lengthy autobiographical essay that I wasn’t quite sure what tohen I reread it now, I’m embarrassed by the
number of mistakes I see. It makes me want tocrawl into a hole. But the truth is that the bookhas served to draw interest in Shōdo Island frommany une pected places. I was especially surprised to hear from someone on the northern tipof Hokkaido one day. And even right here on
Shōdo Island itself, the contributors to the bookmade new discoveries when they read each other’s work.

M y E n c oun te r w ith L oc al L ite rary
H istoryuring the time I was editing this book, my workat the town hall led me to get involved in anotherpro ect.
Shōdo Island has the rare distinction of being
home to three literary figures who were born andgrew up at around the same time Sakae Tsuboi,
Shige i Tsuboi, and en i Kuroshima. It is also
the place where the wandering haiku poet Hōsai
O aki met his demise. Before arriving on the island, I’d only known about Sakae Tsuboi of
Twenty- our yes fame. Once here, I began reading voraciously through her oeuvre, said to in-

The authors of Oide yo, Shōdoshima pose for a celebratory picture when copiesof the finished book arrive. (Photo credit: Hikari Mimura)18

clude some 1600 titles, as well as en i Kuroshima’s. I learned that the houses where they had
lived were both still standing, and the people attown hall took me to see them. hen I visited thehouse within sight of the school that appears in
the film adaptation of Twenty- our yes, and thehouse with the e act configuration of rooms Kuroshima described in an essay eight decades ago,
I came away thinking there had to be a way tobring these writers’ works back into the light ofday. I began by holding a small public reading,and started up a reading group. earning thateven the longtime residents hadn’t read their local
authors, I was able to share in a rediscovery of
their works by reading them aloud together.

The electronic magazine Sono fune ni notte (On the Boat) set sail on July 1, 2016, at
http://sonofune.net. Some of the interviews, essays, and videos are offered as freecontent.

kept capturing my attention as well. e may not
be able to do another book every time we feel thisway, but how about something that can continue
to grow with the ever advancing present Could
that same venue include an electronic bookshelffeaturing the island’s literary figures, so that it
would fulfill both of my desires at the same time
Consulting further with r. Hagino as I tried topiece the pu le together, I ultimately concluded
that an electronic maga ine was the medium I
was looking for.

But I wanted to do something more concrete. I
was now a resident of the island, too, and if I
didn’t do it, who else could I e pect to do it
Sakae Tsuboi’s skill as a storyteller had struck achord with me. I was convinced that life on theisland a hundred years ago must have been e actly as she described in her vivid, well-observed
stories. And I didn’t doubt that those stories accurately reflected the lives of ordinary people living
in outlying areas all over Japan around the sametime. To put it even more strongly, I could feel inher stories the very pulse and breath of the ordinary Japanese of a hundred years ago. She truly
had an eye for detail. I began asking myself
whether there wasn’t some way to bring out anewly selected collection of her short stories, andperhaps a collection of some of her children’s stories as well.

O ur E - Z in e S e ts S ail
hen I pitched this idea to my husband, he interrupted me to say that before anything else I needed to come up with a title. hich I suppose I
could have predicted, since in his work he always
starts with a title. At this point I had only a vague
overall idea of what I was after, and none of thespecifics had taken shape in my mind yet, such as
who would write the articles and stories, whatkind of web site to build, and who would actually
run the operation. Then one day the title Sono
fune ni notte (On the Boat) popped into my head,
and I immediately liked it. hen you live on an
island, you have to get on a boat whether you’re
coming or going. And boarding that boat always
made me feel for some reason as if I could truly
go anywhere on it, all the way to the ends of theearth. As soon as I told my husband, the master ofhand lettering went to work, and by the end of the
day we had a logo. There was no turning backnow.

Then the answer finally came to me, and I
slapped my knee ebooks. I didn’t actually know
the first thing about digital publishing, but I immediately got in touch with asaaki Hagino atoyager Japan. Sure, you should be able to do it
yourselves, he told me. I can easily show you
how.
So I was at another starting line.
In the months since ide yo, Shōdoshima appeared, I’d become all too painfully aware of how
much hadn’t made it into the book, and new people and things I didn’t even know about before

The maga ine will ultimately carry articles and19stories by young people not ust from Shōdo Island but from across the seas as well—Okinawa
for starters, and in time, places like Taiwan andHong Kong, too. Boats carry all manner of cargo,and so will this maga ine. y husband has said
that he wants to do the covers for all our ebooks.
The bookshelf will begin by offering new editionsof Shōdo’s storied literary figures, and e pandfrom there to include new writers as well as entertainment fiction. The beautiful covers areready and waiting. Thanks to what the eb
makes possible, the maga ine will include up-todate event information, as well as eye-catching
photos and videos, but the plan is to make it primarily a maga ine of stories and features to beread. Although we have few professional writers
at the outset, I’d like to envision this as a place
where new writers can be born. I also hope to see
cross-pollination between our electronic publishing endeavors and print publications, and I’meager to have people everywhere sample theproducts of Shōdo Island that the maga ine will
cover.

VOYAGER TIMELINE

Sono fune ni notte set sail in July 2016 with aneditorial team of four—all of them newcomers to
the ob. e have no outside funding. Althoughcontent on the eb is typically free, we are taking the risk of asking readers to pay a modest¥2000 for an annual subscription to help defray
e penses and sustain the site.

Kim iko H iran o (1945– ) is a native ofKanda, Tokyo. She has published widely andproduced numerous stage productions as amedia producer. rom 2005 until 2012 she
was manager of the little theater Theater
Iwato. In 2014 she moved to Shōdo Islandin the Inland Sea, where she serves as acultural promotions adviser to the town of
Shōdoshima and edits the maga ine Sono
fune ni notte (On the Boat).

20

1998.7

T-Time Internet Vertical Writing and Reading Model (Hybrid
edition), a software which converts HTML files into book-liketext in a vertical layout, was released.

1998.10Adapted TTZ format into T-Time, a predecessor of dotbook
format (.book).

2000.6

Adapted .book file format.

2000.9.book was adopted as the standard ebook format in the PABURI
electronic library, the collaborative electronic bookstore of four
major publishing companies (KADOKAWA GROUP PUBLISHING,
Kodansha, SHUEISHA, SHINCHOSHA Publishing).

2006.2

Implemented low-brightness mode in T-Time. Made it possible
for visually impaired persons to read .books by providing choices
in font size, brightness of screen and a magnifying glass.

2006.10

Cooperated with CELSYS and INFOCITY. Adapted BookSurfing,a reader for mobile phones. Started distributing .book files in
BookSurfing format.

2008.5

Announced T-Time Crochet. Started distributing encrypted.book files in increments for faster access. Realized a distributing
system for high capacity content, such as comics, that can
instantly respond to users’ requests regarding display mode.

2008.7

Released T-Time for iPhone. Started providing comic books for
iPhone and iPod touch in App Store.

2011.10

Released the “EPUB3 Japanese Basic Standard” in Japanese andEnglish. Jointly launched the EPUB Japanese Standard Study
Group (EPUBJP).

2011.12

Released “BinB”, a new reading system by Books in Browsers.
At the same time, opened “BinB store” running on this BinB
system.

2012.7

Started providing the “BinB” reading system to Yahoo! Japan
Bookstore.

2012.12

Provided the “BinB” reading system to Shueisha’s “Ultra Jump
Magazine Official Website”.

2013.2Published “Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto – Japanese Edition –”edited by H. McGuire and B. O’Leary, originally published
by O’Reilly Media. Provided the “BinB” reading system
to Kodansha’s special bookstore site “Denponya San (Mr.
e-Bookstore)”.

2013.4

Provided the Chinese-compatible “BinB” reading system to
Taiwanese e-Bookstores, “eCrowd Media Inc.” and “Wanderer
Digital Publishing Inc.”.

2013.10“BinB” reading system, adds support for Aozora Bunko. Launch
new site “Aozora in Browsers” which features vertical writing
display of public domain eBooks registered in Aozora Bunko.

2014.7

Released “Romancer”, a web service for eBook production,
publishing, and promotion.

2015.2Start providing “BinB”, a browser based reading system, toa digital comic promotional site “Mugenshi” by CHING WIN
PUBLISHING CO., LTD.

2016.5

Co-developed Digital Library System which enabled visually
impaired people to read digital books. The system complies
with the Law to Eliminate Discrimination against the people
with special needs, which took effect in April 2016.

2016.6

Romancer introduced a new read-aloud function supportingtablets and smartphones.

2016.9

Shueisha adapted Voyager’s promotion support system “Power
Thumb” to create promotional video of over 130 manga titles
for the digital manga festival “Aki-man!”A Writer on the Family Tree
AuthorYoshio Kataoka
I’ve long been told that if I trace my ancestry
back about two hundred years through my maternal grandfather, there was another writer in thefamily. All indications seem to be that it’s true.
Two hundred years ago means the beginning of
the 1800s. When I look at a chronology, it tellsme this was the era when cartographer Tadataka
Inō was traveling about surveying the countryside, and when the first edition of Jippensha Ikku’s comic novel Tōkaidōchū hizakurige (tr.
Shank’s Mare) appeared.

again, if his works were merely knockoffs ofknockoffs of Tōkaidōchū hizakurige, his distribution system and readership would have beensomething else altogether.
The evidence suggests that writing was his sole
occupation. His labor apparently wasn’t neededin the family trade. I should note that my maternal grandfather was a Buddhist rosary maker inŌmi Hachiman who could trace his roots all theway back Prince Shōtoku (574–622). The supremely practical-minded prince was interested inpromoting local industry. Urged by him to go into
making either roof-tiles or rosaries, a distant ancestor of my grandfather chose the later.

Nobody has been able to determine what sort ofworks my ancestor might have produced, but considering the times, he would have written them ina brush script that I would probably find difficult
to decipher today, and once he had a book’s worthof text committed to paper, he would have turned
the manuscript over to a woodblock carver to cut
the text onto blocks of wood for printing. Then I
imagine the final labor of printing the pages fromthose blocks and binding them into books probably fell back to my ancestor himself.

◎

I mention all this because I’m interested in illuminating the differences between my own writer’s life today and that of my ancestor from 200
years ago, who didn’t just write his books, but
printed, bound, and sold them as well. Except forneeding to have someone else carve the woodblocks for printing, he was in effect a one-man
publishing house. I, on the other hand, have beenable to give my undivided attention to writing in
the half century since my work began appearing
in print. Furthermore, all the writing I have donein that time has been in response to publisher demand. Sometimes an editor calls me up to ask
what I might have for him and I suggest ideas,
other times I bring story ideas to an editor without being asked, but in either case I’m working
with the knowledge that an editor who works fora publishing company is looking for things to
publish. Even though what to write and how isleft entirely up to me, I’m responding to publisher
demand.

How many copies did he print? How much dideach copy cost? How did he sell his books? Whatkind of people bought them? Although nobody
knows the answer to any of these questions, it isinteresting to speculate.
My guess is that his books weren’t something justanybody could buy. Buyers probably were limited
to those above a certain economic as well as intellectual threshold. I can picture my ancestor
visiting the homes of wealthy families one by one
in door-to-door salesman fashion, looking forpeople interested in his latest work. Perhaps acopy or two would turn up if I conducted a systematic search through storehouses belonging tothe older families of the Ōmi Hachiman area. Or
perhaps my ancestor’s readers would have been
the sort who belonged to temples instead. Then

For every one of the many books I have written, apublisher has always stood between myself andthe printed book. The world today takes this for21

man who worked for quite some time in the marketing department of a well-known publishinghouse before being reassigned to the editorial division. He listed a number of reasons for his aversion to running a bookstore, including the large
number of inventory items and the meticulous
work needed to track them, the tiny profit built
into each sale, the inordinate amount of labor demanded to capture even those small returns, theconsequent necessity for the whole family to help
out, and never getting a day off.

granted and thinks nothing of it, but it seems tome it’s quite a remarkable thing. Let’s take a lookat the full process. It begins with me writing theoriginal manuscript, after which I follow it
through the various editorial stages until I’ve readthe proofs and arranged for all the necessary corrections, but once that much has been done, I’mrelieved of any role in the rest of the book’s journey. I have no further contact with the book as itis actually being made, when the finished book isreleased into the distribution network, or after itreaches retail store display tables where readers
can pick it up. Does that not seem remarkable?

As pretty much anybody with an interest in books
will tell you, there are a great many bookstores
today that have little to recommend them in termsof customer appeal. To my mind, this is most fundamentally an issue of profitability. Bookstoresmust maintain a certain level of sales per square
floor space per day in order to be profitable, andthat calculation can be seen not just on the
shelves but in every aspect of the store. The bigger the publisher, the more they like to spout
high-minded rhetoric about publishing being acultural activity, but you can see just how shallow
their cultural aspirations are when declining manga sales send them into a tizzy. And it is thesevery publishers, the major houses, who are creating the retail store conditions described above:
low profits, onerous labor burdens, stores without
any appeal, and the endless string of closures.
How so? By keeping cover prices low because
they know that their size will let them make thedifference back in volume.

That’s simply the difference 200 years make,comes the glib response. The technological progress the world has seen during those two centuries
fine-tuned industrial specialization to the nth degree, and now compensates each business and occupation for expertly filling its particular function. But those who say this are merely describing
the current status quo, which turns writers into
nothing more than single-function cogs.
A writer could in fact remain engaged with his
book beyond the proof stage, following it closely
through actual production of the physical book. It
would not be particularly difficult for him to participate in book design, as well as in the actual
printing and binding work if he wished. He could
enjoy the satisfaction of a book that reflects his
wishes in every way and that was produced withhis own hands. But if the chance was then offeredto personally go out and sell the entire initialprint run to readers, I’m quite sure virtually every
author would demur. It’s all too obvious that theeffort required far exceeds the potential reward.

Suppose I walk into a store and buy a book for¥3000. The store needs to get at least 25% of thisamount—¥750 in this case—in order to cover it’slabor and other operating costs. And this 25% figure has to be considered an absolute minimum
just to survive; it leaves nothing to apply towards
creating a more appealing environment thatwould let the store distinguish itself from thecompetition. In order to support those who wish
to run bookstores as their personal value proposition to society, a minimum of 25% profit needs tobe sacrosanct.

Which brings us to the central problem facing
publishing today.
◎

The books a publisher produces flow by way of a
distributor into retail bookstores, which then havethe task of actually selling the books to readers.
In recent years Japan’s retail bookstores havebeen going out of business in droves, sometimes
more than a thousand in a year’s time. One editor
I know said to me that if he were to go into theretail business, the very last kind of store hewould want to have is a bookstore. This was a

Yet because the large publishers depend on abusiness model that calls for keeping prices as
low as possible, they are the least likely to produce books that enable retailers to take a 25%
22

books: basically, keeping books cheap makes
them easier to sell. But the burden of this, as amplified by the distribution system, is falling on thesmall retail stores, which, under the crushingweight, are failing in record numbers with seemingly no end in sight. Quite simply, selling ishard. We need to look more closely at exactly
what it involves. To sell books as a business implies an expectation of profit, but we need to look
more closely at the nature of those profits. The
most effective way of doing this is to begin by reducing the scale to the smallest possible unit. In
that sense, I think we can look to one-man publishers as our greatest hope.

margin. This dynamic in which the major publishers get their profits by squeezing the small retailer represents the most serious crisis facing Japanese publishing today.
◎

As I say, every one of the books I’ve written has
been ushered into print by a publishing house, but
it’s also worth noting that in each case the person
I have worked with is a single editor. I’ve almost
never given any thought to the company behind
this editor. After all, I’m not working for thecompany. I’m an individual independent writer,and I get an individual editor to work with me oneach book I write. It’s a comfortable relationship.
On those rare occasions when something uncomfortable happens, it invariably involves the company behind the editor.

◎

I suppose my writer-ancestor’s most importantsales routes would have been located in Kyoto.
Bookstores no doubt did exist, but even in thebustling ancient capital, they wouldn’t have been
on every corner. Since we’re talking about 200
years ago, it might be a stretch even to picture
five stores in the entire city. But let us assume
there were five. If my ancestor made the roundsof those stores and learned that a single copy ofhis book had sold in three of the stores, he would
surely have settled into his room at the inn thatevening with a feeling of great accomplishment.

It extends from this that the ideal arrangement fora writer is to work with a single accomplished editor on each project, and for that accomplishededitor to also be a devoted operator of a verysmall publishing house. If the editor is at thesame time the publisher, it means he will also beheavily involved in the sales process. Extending
this a step further, we must also ask the questionof whether writers should be satisfied with justbeing writers and nothing else. Shouldn’t we also
be involved in sales? When it comes to the difficult question of actually selling the finishedbooks, shouldn’t I as the writer be engaged rightalongside my one-man editor/publisher?

[Editor’s note: A version of this article originally appeared in
the September 2002 edition of the Japanese-language quarterly Hon to konpyūta (The Book & The Computer) under thetitle Shigoto aite wa itsumo hitori no henshūsha (Always
Working with an Individual Editor).]I’ve argued for some time now that every publishing house should have at least one companyowned retail outlet where it sells its own books
directly to the public. The outlet needs to be an
independent, self-supporting entity so that eachpublisher’s editorial and sales staff can see firsthand how the financials of running a retail bookstore actually work out. Having long felt both thetremendous difficulty involved in selling books
as well its tremendous underlying appeal, I arrived at this idea as one way we could begin
bridging the divide.

Yoshio Kataoka (1939– ) was born inTokyo. His family evacuated to Iwakuni in
Yamaguchi Prefecture during the war, thenlater moved to Kure in neighboring
Hiroshima Prefecture before returning toTokyo when Kataoka was 13. He began
contributing columns to Misuterī magajin(Mystery Magazine) while still a student at
Waseda University, and made his literary
debut in 1974 with the novel Shiroi nami nokōya e (To the Wasteland of White Waves).
In 2016 he published the autobiographicalnovel Kōhī ni dōnatsu-ban, kuroi nitto no tai(Coffee, 45s, and Black Knit Tie). Besides
being a prolific writer, he has translated
numerous works into Japanese, and is also anaccomplished photographer.

The low-price strategy that has become conventional among big publishers emerged from using
the advantages afforded by size to compensate forthe many difficulties associated with selling23

Voyager Books

Yoshio Kataoka’s Digital Collection Join the author support group!

Natsuki Ikezawa’ss Digital Collection

Text: the next frontier

Available from the “impala e-books” series

Looking at the future of books and publishing

Let’s Talk about the Book of the Future
Original Edition (Japanese) first published on September 1, 2016
English Edition first published on November 1, 2016
Translator: Wayne Lammers (pp.1-7, 11-23)
Cover Illustration: Hokusai Katsushika
Cover Design: Koga Hirano
Editorial Design: Marui-Kobunsha Corporation
Voyager Japan, Inc.
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