Greetings from the magazine aisle of my local Tsutaya where I’m more than a little surprised to find the English version of Brutus for sale.
In the past few months, in these Also pieces, I’ve been talking a lot about rejecting digital artifacts in favor of tangible media. You know, vinyl instead of mp3s, paperbacks instead of ebooks. And, most cromulently for tonight’s topic, magazines instead of apps.
I love a good magazine; the sheer tactility, the art, the design, the craft with which a good layout unfolds the contents before you ever turn a page, it’s an art and one that is finally getting its flowers.
Japan has been at the forefront of this appreciation of magazine as object d’art for decades. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of cheap, glossy magazines that will fall apart as soon as you spill your noodles on them, but there are hundreds, thousands, of beautifully designed and executed magazines that find the border between art and product and then blur it into meaninglessness.
There are few things better than taking an evening off and going to any of the bookstores near me and just wandering through the magazine aisles. I don’t bother with the cheap glossies too much and I’m not brave enough for the stout little literature journals. Me, I’m a photo boy. An enthusiast. A fan. A proponent. A hobbyist.
So I get into the magazine aisle and look for PEN or Genic or LEICA right there in the hobby section, two aisles down from women’s lifestyle and right across from the audio geek corner. Because magazines, the ones we buy, the ones we collect, the ones we just sit and look at while we flip the pages gently, admiring the quality and elegance of the finished product, all these disparate magazines, they tell us who we are.
So then, who’s the English edition of Brutus for?
It’s not me. This Tsutaya doesn’t really have an English section1. And this magazine, Brutus, doesn’t really fit there anyway. Brutus is a (mostly) men’s lifestyle brand. Which begs the question, are there that many Japanese readers of Brutus both interested and capable of reading an English edition dedicated to giving perspective on traveling to Kyoto?
Maybe. After all, Japan is changing. For as much as the current political climate is swinging right and for as much rhetoric as there is about curbing the number of foreigners and instituting fees and language exams, the government is still trying to increase the number of overseas tourists to Japan.
Within a few miles (fine, kilometers) of me, there are restaurants with English menus, guided tours with actual live English-speaking hosts, and even, shock, gasp, horror, actual foreigners who live here full time. For decades even!
This particular edition of Brutus is, I’m guessing, for the young Japanese person who wants to flex their English abilities, maybe work at one of the places these hordes of tourists are swarming to. Maybe even go overseas one day. Regardless, I’m guessing that whoever buys it sees something in it that comprises part of their answer to the eternal question - who are you?
Back in college, one of my favorite rituals was the every other Friday new magazine day. We had an actual newsstand in those days. I can’t remember the name, but the atmosphere is burned into my memory like a brand. The place was done in browns and greens. Leather seats and sofas. A dizzying array of magazines punctuated by a display counter full of cigars, clove cigarettes, pipes and all the assorted accoutrement.
Payday meant going there with a fresh twenty and stocking up on Esquire, Playboy2, Rolling Stone, Wired, and, occasionally, Time or Newsweek. Grab a chair, maybe a smoke, and sit back and take in the news of the day. What I wouldn’t give to get that culture back, you know?
Your choices also acted as a subtle acknowledgement of who you thought you were. Rolling Stone over Hit Parade? Esquire over G.Q.? Vogue over Cosmo? Every title said something, whether you intended it to or not. External badges of identity, title words like fan or aficionado became your descriptives.
When I moved to Japan, I found that little slice of life largely intact; English printed material came from one of three locations: the kiosk in the station had a half-dozen copies of The Daily Yomiuri3 and The Japan Times. Kinokunia had an entire wall of books and magazines. The prefectural library carried a truly generous selection of magazines for the city’s size and demographics.
Copies of Time, Newsweek, National Geographic, Wired, Rolling Stone got traded and handed around like baseball cards, Beanie babies, and Pokemon all rolled into one.
But now, the magazines weren’t expressing the id of any one person. Rather, because we were all English-speakers, because we were all foreigners living in Japan, because we shared aspects of our cultures cross borders, our identity became collective. We read the same magazines, we knew who we were.
As has happened globally, it seems, every third bookstore in Japan now hosts, or is (ahem) chained to, a coffee shop. The Tsutaya I usually go to has a nice Dotour cafe attached to it, and if it’s not my favorite big brand coffee, it’ll do for a rainy Thursday afternoon.
So I grab a magazine or three - photos, whiskey, coffee, maybe someday I’ll be brave enough for that literary journal - and I get something dark and bitter and easy to drink and I admire the craft of the magazine in my hands. And I think that maybe, just maybe, that culture I loved so much in college isn’t quite so dead after all. Which leaves only the perpetual question:
Who are you these days, what are you reading?
The TOEIC prep books and sad Harry Potter remnants don’t count.
Just like you, I only read it for the articles.
The mockery I received for being unable to say Yomiuri correctly still haunts me.