VOX POPULI: It took a disaster to show us the power of print through a manga
Vox Populi, Vox Dei is a daily column that runs on Page 1 of The Asahi Shimbun.
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Yuichi Shiokawa, right, manager of the Shiokawa Shoten bookstore in Sendai’s Aoba Ward, stands by as a boy reads a copy of Weekly Shonen Jump on March 25, 2011. (Asahi Shimbun file photo)
The story goes back to a few days after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, which devastated wide areas of northeastern Japan.
In the aftermath, a bookstore in Sendai, Tohoku’s largest city, stopped getting deliveries of magazines.
An Asahi Shimbun reporter saw a handwritten sign taped up at the store: “Shonen Jump, March 19 issue – read it here!! One copy only.”
The shop had managed to obtain a single copy of Weekly Shonen Jump, one of Japan’s best-known manga anthology magazines. The reporter wrote that it had been read in that store by more than 100 children.
The precious copy had been brought back by a customer who had traveled all the way to Yamagata to buy it.
One reader, a 13-year-old boy, was finally able to find out what happened next in the manga series he had been following.
“Now I can rest easy,” he reportedly said.
Children shaken by the disaster took turns reading the magazine, its cover curling at the corners. They laughed together over its pages – becoming, for a while, children again.
The shop’s proprietor, Yuichi Shiokawa, later recalled the period.
“It brought home to me anew the power a single book can have,” he said, according to nonfiction writer Ren Inaizumi in his “Zoho Fukko no Shoten” (Bookshops on the road to recovery, expanded edition).
And now? We are told that Jump’s average print run from April through June has fallen below 1 million copies.
At its peak, the figure was 6.53 million. That era now seems almost like ancient history.
From paper to digital – is this headlong shift simply the tide of the times?
There is something undeniably sad about the figure.
In a world without books printed on paper, where will the feelings Shiokawa and his customers experienced that day find a home? Will children still be brought together in laughter in quite the same way?
To return to where we began, The Asahi Shimbun article drew an overwhelming response, and copies of Jump poured into Sendai from across the country, sent with the simple wish that others might read them.
But the bookstore itself later closed its doors. It is no longer there.
A line from a well-known poem by Hiroshi Osada (1939-2015) comes to mind.
“Each of us holds to our heart the book that is our life/ A single human being is a single book.”
Vox Populi, Vox Dei is a popular daily column that takes up a wide range of topics, including culture, arts and social trends and developments. Written by veteran Asahi Shimbun writers, the column provides useful perspectives on and insights into contemporary Japan and its culture.
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