During the first week of every month, retired businessman Chang Ching-ping (張慶彬) asks his daughter to drive him to Sogo, a Japanese-style department store in downtown Taipei. Once there, he heads straight for the Kinokuniya Bookstore on the seventh floor and quickly disappears among the crowd and the shelves. Half an hour later he meets his daughter again, with a content smile on his face and the booty of his trip in his hands: a bag full of Japanese-language magazines and books that will keep him company for the rest of the month.
In this fashion, Chang, 65, spends about US$100 every month at Kinokuniya. Sometimes he also walks to the Q Books Center, not far from his apartment in eastern Taipei, where he spends another US$50 on Japanese publications per month. His regular purchases include the highly respected literary monthly Bungei Shyunju, the news journal Asahi Weekly, and a variety of stereo, TV, and golf magazines.
Like most people who grew up during the fifty-year Japanese occupation of Taiwan, which ended in 1945, Chang had a Japanese education. Although outside of school he spoke Taiwanese, the local Chinese dialect, he never became fluent in reading Chinese. As 72-year-old Huang Tien-heng (黃天橫), another regular customer of Q Books, explains, "People like us have much better reading comprehension in Japanese than in Chinese. It's not something we are proud of, but it is a fact we cannot deny."
Because of people like Huang and Chang, Japanese magazines enjoy a sizable market in Taiwan, with 240,000 copies imported every month and about two hundred different publications widely available. The market is enough to support a number of bookstores specializing in Japanese publications. Chiu Yung-han (邱永漢) opened the first Q Books Center fifteen years ago. As a Taiwan-born writer and stock market analyst living in Japan, he realized that Taiwan had a large Japanese-reading population that was eager for more up-to-date publications than were typically available. Says Q Books General Manager Yang Ting-fa (楊廷發), who has been with the company since it opened, "At that time, Japan was far more advanced than Taiwan in every aspect. Mr. Chiu believed people here could learn a lot from Japan, especially in the development of industry and technology."
Ah, so much to choose from—Like most senior citizens, Huang Tien-heng learned Japanese in school. He now spends his spare time reading Japanese books and magazines.
Although there were a number of traditional Japanese bookstores on the island, many of them set up in occupation times, they soon began losing customers to Q Books, which offered a much larger selection of publications and also brighter, more modern decor. Gradually, nearly all of the old bookstores closed down. The few left are family operations that are not likely to last another generation. "The children of the owners usually don't want to carry on the business," Yang says.
But for Q Books, business has only gotten better over the last fifteen years. Yang remembers that when the store first opened, only a single truck was needed to carry the imported magazines from the harbor. And once the shipment had arrived, it could easily be stored in a corner of the office before going on sale. Today, a whole fleet of trucks delivers the monthly stock and a huge warehouse is needed for storage. In addition to having eleven of its own stores around the island, Q Books is also the island's major importer and distributor for Japanese magazines, supplying large retail chains such as Family Mart convenience stores, Kingstone bookstores, and Watson's drugstores.
The Japanese-owned Kinokuniya bookstores are a similar success story. The first local branch was set up in Taipei's Sogo Department Store in 1987 and imported about 20,000 copies of Japanese magazines in its first year. Three more stores are now operating—in the Taipei suburb of Tienmu, where many Japanese expatriates live, and in the down-island cities of Taichung and Kaohsiung. To meet the needs of all four stores, 200,000 magazines are shipped from Japan every year.
Akiyama Yoshio of Kinokuniya Bookstore—"Although there are 10,000 overseas Japanese in Taiwan, our major clients here are local Chinese."
Kinokuniya's general manager in Taiwan, Akiyama Yoshio, believes the island's Japanese readership is unique in the world. The company does have other bookstores outside of Japan, including branches in the United States, Britain, Singapore, and Thailand, but the majority of their customers are ethnic Japanese. "Although there are ten thousand overseas Japanese in Taiwan," Akiyama says, "our major clients here are local Chinese."
But the nature of these clients is changing. The generation of older Chinese who speak and read Japanese is gradually dying out, and some of the magazines that catered to them are losing their market share. These are mostly publications with extensive written content, such as Bungei Shyunju, which publishes fiction and essays by established writers. "Five years ago, our retailer in Taichung could still sell about one hundred copies of the Bungei Shyunju every month," says Q Books General Manager Yang. "Recently has dropped to less than ten copies a month."
Still, the market for Japanese magazines continues to thrive in other types of publications. At both Q Books and Kinokuniya, the more literary magazines are being replaced by fashion and lifestyle publications that are light on text and heavy on graphics. And the readership is shifting to younger people who know little if any Japanese. "The people who received a Japanese education now make up only half of our customers," Akiyama says. The rest are young people who buy Japanese magazines not to read them, but to look at the pictures. As Yang explains, "Take the Non-no fashion magazine for instance. Many girls in Taiwan buy it to find out about fashion trends in Japan. They can learn how to dress just by looking at the models." Because written Japanese incorporates many Chinese characters, local readers can also get a basic idea of what the text says, especially if it is a straightforward article on fashion or beauty tips.
Circulation for the biweekly Non-no is close to 100,000—compared with about 17,000 for Citta Bella, the most popular local fashion magazine—and it can easily be found anywhere magazines are sold, including most convenience stores. At the twenty-six Kingstone book stores around the island, Non-no and Men's Non-no are among the ten best-selling magazines. Two other women’s magazines from Japan, With and More, are also big sellers. "These four probably account for half of the total number of Japanese magazines imported to Taiwan," Yang says.
Japanese fashion magazines outsell many local fashion magazines as well as international publications such as Cosmo and Harper's Bazaar. Their popularity comes from a more practical approach to fashion rather than emphasizing glossy pictures and glamorous models in unwearable clothes. Compared to American and European magazines, they also offer an Asian rather than Western sensibility. Non-no, for example, regularly runs photos of everyday young women around Japan, showing the clothing styles that are actually being worn. For many readers in Taiwan, seeing the way their peers dress in fashion-conscious Japan is a real inspiration. "The way Japanese girls coordinate things is really chic!" says one 19-year-old junior college student. "I don't think girls in Taiwan can be that creative and bold. Non-no gives me the idea that I can be creative if I want to."
Another appeal of these magazines is price. Although there are upscale Japanese fashion magazines that are comparable in price to the slick Western publications, the popular ones like Non-no sell for US$4— much cheaper than local fashion magazines, which sell for about US$7.50.
Japanese publications on interior design, travel, sports, and housekeeping are also big sellers. Kingstone bookstores sell more than seven hundred copies of various Japanese interior design magazines every month, and Q Books sells nearly five hundred copies of six different golf magazines. Such specialty lifestyle publications are in themselves a relatively new phenomenon in Taiwan, becoming more popular as people's spending power and leisure time increase. But many of the local publications of this sort are actually poor-quality imitations of Japanese magazines, with the same text translated into Chinese and many of the photos directly reproduced. "I can tell you exactly which Taiwan interior design magazine copies from which Japanese interior design magazine," Yang says. "That's why many of our customers would rather buy the original Japanese magazines."
Children's comic books from Japan are another popular choice. Since many Taiwan kids grow up with frequent exposure to Japanese cartoons, many of the characters are familiar even if the words are not. It is also fairly easy to figure out the story simply by looking at the pictures. The market for comics also includes college students studying Japanese. As one 20-year-old student at Q Books commented, "It's easier and more fun to learn Japanese from comic books."
Besides the two hundred mainstream Japanese magazines available in Taiwan, another three hundred professional publications are also imported regularly. These cater to specialized fields such as electronics, engineering, and computer science. "They are usually sold to professional people, companies, schools, and organizations," says Akiyama of Kinokuniya bookstores.
The future of imported Japanese magazines could see some changes, however. Akiyama, for example, foresees that the continuing decline in older, Japanese speaking readers could still have an impact on the market, and some of his stores are starting to increase their stock of Chinese publications. Q Books General Manager Yang predicts that many of the most popular Japanese magazines will eventually set up joint ventures and begin publishing Taiwan editions in Chinese. As a safety net, he also plans to expand Q Books' offerings. "We will be selling more Chinese magazines," he says. "And we're thinking of importing English magazines as well, because they seem to be more profitable than Japanese ones." But unlike Akiyama, Yang believes the market for Japanese publications will remain strong for some time. "I don't think the market is going to become smaller," he says. "In fact, it has increased a lot in the last five years."