Books in Japan

One thing that really impresses me about Japan is the book publishing.

I'm not sure about the exact numbers, but Japan has a population of about 120 million people, out of 6.5 billion global population. This isn't exactly a very large proportion of the world. The point is that the Japanese are the only people in the world who can read Japanese, and when you walk into a Japanese book store the sheer number of books seems disproportionate to the number of people who can actually read Japanese.

Maybe they just really like reading. Or maybe the fact that most Japanese can't, or won't, read books in other languages makes publishing in Japanese a lucrative business.

Just today we visited a book shop in a not so large city, and they had an entire shelf dedicated, and I'm not joking here, to kendo literature. All in Japanese of course (cry). And, almost like a library, the store only carried one or two copies of each book which made it even more impressive.

Needles to say, I bought one (with lost of big pictures and a DVD).

Next I'm going to look for a book on dojo construction. I haven't found anything in English, so maybe there will be something in Japanese.