What's It Like to Own 780,000 Magazines? Put It This Way: They Cover Japan's Past 150 Years

We talked to a staff member who has worked there for 31 years. He'll tell you the library's history.

Over the past month, the Oya Soichi Library, in 3-chome, Hachimanyama, Setagaya Ward, Tokyo, has received a great many uninvited guests.

Some are regulars. Some are strangers who came after hearing of its reputation. Others are reporters from Japanese TV stations and newspapers, following a lead. They all came to see how this library — home to the richest magazine collection in Japan, 780,000 volumes, and now caught in a crisis over its own survival — is actually doing.

Rewind to May 18 this year. Kamoshida Hiroshi, who runs the Oya Soichi Library's business division, launched a campaign on the Japanese crowdfunding site Readyfor. In a post titled "Protect the Oya Soichi Library! Japan's First Magazine Library," Kamoshida said the library was in financial trouble and hoped to raise 5 million yen to cover day-to-day operations. By May 30 the campaign had sailed past 6.3 million yen — a full month before the deadline.

The news travelled fast, and Japan's big media outlets rushed to cover the Oya Soichi Library: TBS, the Sankei Shimbun, the Nikkei. The name of Japan's first "magazine library" was reaching more and more people.

The name "Oya Soichi Library" first appeared in 1971.

On November 22, 1970, Oya Soichi — the well-known Japanese literary critic and nonfiction writer — died. His private house, which held 200,000 books, was turned by his wife, Oya Masa, into the Oya Soichi Library. She served as its chairwoman until her own death in 2007.

Oya Soichi was born in 1900 and showed unusual literary talent from his student days. After World War II he called himself "a man without ideas," yet he made his name in Japanese media on the strength of sharp commentary about society and public figures. He was also a screenwriter; his best-known work is the 1967 film Japan's Longest Day, directed by Okamoto Kihachi. The Oya Soichi Nonfiction Award, which he founded before his death, is one of the weightier prizes in Japanese letters.

Looking back over Oya's career, beyond the library and the nonfiction award, his most important legacy may be the words he coined to describe the Japan of his day. He attacked the arrival of the television age and the flood of coarse programming it brought, which he believed was producing people who did nothing but watch television and whose imagination and capacity for thought had withered — a phenomenon he called "the total idiotization of a hundred million people." On Japan's 1946 education reform, "one national university per prefecture," Oya dubbed the new suburban campuses built right beside train stations "station bento universities." He also coined kuchikomi, the Japanese word for word of mouth. In the end, no account of him was complete without the line: "the famous man who coined so many new words."

Oya Soichi once said that books are not only for reading — they are also for borrowing from.

As a critic, every time he wrote a piece he tried to find as many books and documents as he could to draw on, and he was a fixture at Japan's secondhand bookshops and used-book markets. While working on Jitsuroku Tennoki (A True Record of the Emperor) and Hono wa Nagareru (The Flames Flow), known as Oya's own version of a Taisho history, he would go hunting for material in those shops and, using the rail network already in place, mail box after box of books home. Over time the books and magazines in his house grew past 200,000 volumes. He opened the collection to friends and acquaintances, and his storeroom slowly became something like a private parlor — the "Weed Library."

Built on Oya Soichi's own collection, the Oya Soichi Library now holds the first issue of very nearly every magazine published in Japan from 1867 to the present — across the Meiji, Taisho, Showa and Heisei eras, 150 years in all. Since the nonprofit was founded in 1971, the library has taken in an average of more than 10,000 new magazines a year, building up to today's astonishing 780,000 volumes.

Besides the main building, converted from Oya Soichi's house, the library now runs a branch in Saitama Prefecture, on the outskirts of Tokyo.

The oldest magazine in its holdings is Kaikan Zasshi (Hall Magazine) from 1875, published by the Kazoku Kaikan, the assembly hall of Japan's peerage; it carried pieces such as "Record of Proceedings Attended by the Emperor" and "Record of Lectures Attended by the Emperor." (In the second year of Meiji, 1869, Japan abolished the daimyo and grouped the former feudal lords under one name, the kazoku, or peerage.)

Kaikan Zasshi is not Japan's oldest magazine. In 1867, on the eve of Emperor Meiji formally forming a new government and pushing through modernizing reforms, Japan was hungry for new knowledge from the West. That was the moment Seiyo Zasshi (Magazine of the West) appeared, translated directly out of foreign magazines. It doesn't count as the first true Japanese magazine, but it still marks the opening of Japan's magazine age.

Like most Japanese nonprofits, the converted Oya Soichi Library takes all its income from the membership fees its users pay, plus a good many donations. An ordinary reader pays 300 yen to get in and borrow ten magazines. Since June this year, 500 yen buys up to fifteen.

More than 100,000 people use the Oya Soichi Library every year. But digitization has hollowed out print, and the library's users are changing with it.

A few years ago the library took in about 1,000 titles and 10,000 issues a year. Lately that has slipped to 800 titles — many of them thick fashion magazines with thin contents, most of the bulk made up of ad pages, so that "at a glance, all you seem to see is the colorful spines of fashion magazines." Meanwhile the day-to-day cost of running the place refuses to come down, leaving the Oya Soichi Library with an annual deficit of more than 20 million yen.

Its loyal users are worried. They include working writers and ordinary readers, and for all of them the Oya Soichi Library is an enormous treasure house.

After word got out that the library was raising money because it was struggling, several well-known Japanese figures told the press what they thought. The writer Inose Naoki said the Oya library is part of Japan's cultural heritage and should be kept. The screenwriter Nogi Akiko said, "If you want to research anything from before the internet age, it's either the National Diet Library or the Oya library."

Kamoshida Hiroshi, now 49, has worked at the Oya Soichi Library longer than anyone else there. Thirty-one years ago, still enrolled at a school that trained reporters, he loved reading and wanted a job in publishing, so he took a part-time job at the library. After he graduated he became a full-time employee.

In his time there, Kamoshida has seen the library change in ways large and small. The building began as a private house, and the growing pile of magazines forced one expansion after another, until the old place lost any clear plan: rows of tall shelves, and almost nowhere else to stand.

Digitization changed the most, and that is what he feels most sharply.

Over these 31 years the library's magazine index went from handwritten cards to an enormous database. The library got faster and easier to use, but its readers no longer arrive with the old enthusiasm. They used to treat it as a storehouse of ideas, coming once or twice a week to look for more ways of understanding the world. Now the internet has made a trip to the stacks feel clumsy, and few people will spend the time and effort to go exploring the way they once did.

"Move a finger, type a word, and Google turns up what you want in seconds. But that way of working creates a new problem: you look something up only because you know you don't know it," Kamoshida said — which means "you find the thing you wanted and stop there." Magazines, he thinks, widen your field of view, because the pages just after the one that interests you are quite likely to open onto a subject you had never come across.

Over the years his appetite for magazines, for books, and for the work itself has not dimmed at all. The job has let him watch 150 years of change in Japanese society, fashion and custom, and being able to feed his own curiosity is, to him, the greatest thing it offers.

Take the mid-1970s through the 1980s, when the word on everyone's lips in Japan was the "anno tribe." Japanese women's fashion magazines led by anan and non-no were on the rise, and their full-color travel photo spreads sent large numbers of Japanese readers off sightseeing wherever the magazines pointed. Add the growth of the national railway, and a whole wave of women travelers shaped by magazines appeared — the anno tribe that swept the country at the time. You can still find these peculiar episodes of Japanese social history in the pages of anan and non-no.

Last year the NHK morning drama Big Sister in Charge suddenly made the Japanese lifestyle magazine Kurashi no Techo, launched in 1946, a hot topic again. On one visit by a Japanese news crew, Kamoshida walked into the stacks and, without hesitating, pulled out the first issue of Kurashi no Techo. What caught his eye was not what caught theirs: for him the interesting thing about the magazine was "ah, this is the issue with the ad for an electric iron" — meaning electric irons were already common in Japan more than 70 years ago.

Fast online search may well produce another "total idiotization of a hundred million people" for the information age. It has also transformed the Oya Soichi Library.

Unlike other libraries, the Oya Soichi Library runs an indexing system it developed itself, the Oya Classification System. The method cares above all about getting you to the material fast, through simple, spoken-language keywords, and it keeps adding new search terms as new words catch on. Other institutions use it widely to index magazine articles.

Say you want to search, in 2017, for coverage of the Great East Japan Earthquake: you can pull up 4,341 magazines on the subject. Type in "temporary housing," "evacuation shelter," "disaster victims" or a specific place name, and you can search inside those 4,341 entries until you find what you want. Disasters are only one case. Oya Classification search terms can be Nintendo game consoles, B-grade gourmet food, otaku. The range of people runs from members of the imperial family such as Crown Princess Masako and Princess Kako of Akishino, across film and television to Shinkai Makoto and Sakai Masato, and on to robot designers like Ishiguro Hiroshi and Takahashi Tomotaka.

As Kamoshida sees it, "a magazine is like a Wikipedia entry, and whether you can search its contents this precisely is what decides a magazine's value." The library is not against digitization; it wants to use the technology to work more efficiently. It is only that the library's core asset, the magazines, still lies in the stacks on paper. Technology can cut the time it takes to find the issue you want, but you still have to come to the Oya Soichi Library to get it.

Most of the magazines the library holds were given to it by publishers, with some bought directly, but not all of them have a complete index. Kamoshida wants to index the older issues, and there aren't enough hands to do it.

The crowdfunded money will go mainly to running the library, starting with its biggest expense, wages. The Oya Soichi Library has 34 employees, nearly half as many as the 60 it had at its peak. Their work is fiddly and repetitive, not most people's idea of interesting.

Fetching magazines for readers is the main job. To protect the collection, readers can't go into the stacks; they ask a staff member to go in, find the issue and bring it to the reading room.

Staff also do the photocopying and put the magazines back afterward. About 1,700 magazines are pulled out of the cramped stacks and returned every day.

Each time a new batch arrives, staff coat the spines with black PVD film to keep them from being damaged. Running the library's own search system eats time and labor too: it means going through page by page, entering every magazine by content and category. For a magazine with a lot of pages, entering a single issue can take a whole day. And every five years the staff have to update the catalog index of the collection.

Digitizing all 780,000 magazines would be a hard job to even imagine. Then there is copyright: a magazine involves so many authors that, with the law as it stands weighted toward the rights holder, clearing permissions is a serious headache. Last there is the question of what digitized magazines might earn, and for now that can't be known.

But Kamoshida doesn't think the library will disappear. Perhaps for a man who has worked here 31 years, it means more to talk about small things. He'll tell you, for instance: when you take a magazine off the shelf, pull the one to its right out a little way, and it will be easier to put back.

Cover image and photographs via tomagazine, Readyfor and the Oya Soichi Library.