Leaving Tokyo to Open a 5.5-Square-Meter Used Bookstore in Okinawa! | Yoshii Shinobu's Second Round

"Yoshii Shinobu's Second Round" is a QDaily column by Yoshii Shinobu, a Japanese writer who writes in Chinese. A "second round" (nijikai) is what Japanese office workers call the second stop of a night out — after the first bar, anyone who feels like it comes along, and the talk runs easier.

For many Japanese, getting to the used bookstore Urara takes some doing. It is "far."

Urara, the Used Bookstore in the Market (Urara for short) sits in Naha, the capital of Okinawa Prefecture (the largest city on Okinawa's main island, population about 320,000), 1,556 kilometers from Tokyo. That is roughly the distance from Beijing to Changsha, in Hunan. Naha to Taipei, by contrast, is barely 600-some kilometers — one reason Okinawa and Taiwan have so much in common in culture and custom. A clear blue sky opens over clear blue water; a soft sea breeze carries the sound of the sanshin, a melody light and lovely with a touch of melancholy... In many people's minds, Okinawa is a faraway place thick with the air of a tropical island.

Take the monorail from Naha Airport and get off at the eighth stop, Makishi. Makishi sits in the west-central part of Naha, the liveliest part of the city. Step out of the station and you are already on Kokusai-dori, the famous shopping street; follow it, alongside countless foreign tourists, to Ichiba Hondori (Market Main Street), turn left, and keep walking until the Makishi Public Market comes into view. Urara sits directly across from it.

Some call Urara the smallest used bookstore in Japan — the shop itself is only about the size of three tatami mats, roughly 5.5 square meters. But when you actually see it on that crowded shopping street, it does not feel that small. This is not the sentimental notion that a small bookstore's world is no smaller than a big one's. It is because the shop's charming owner, Uda Tomoko, has picked up a trick from the Okinawan shopkeepers around her: she moves part of her shelving out onto the street to enlarge the shop. That improvised stretch of sidewalk runs to another three tatami mats or so — in effect doubling her commercial space.

The sight brought something home to me. A bookstore, in the end, is a way of doing business. In recent years the mass media has run a steady stream of features on bookstores — their culture, their concepts, their ideals, their style, their design. But at bottom a bookstore is a business, and from that angle it is no different from selling fruit, Okinawan brown sugar, pickles, clothes or dried bonito.

An open-air little bookstore appearing out of the crowd and the noise is, in fact, hard to miss. Walk slowly up to it and you will see, in the small space behind the shelves, a woman sitting quietly, reading. Take a book off the shelf and open it and she will not even greet you. Step one or two paces off the walkway and you find the space inside startlingly quiet. A few posters for local used-book fairs or small performances are pinned to the wall; if one interests you, you can ask her about it. At that she looks up, fixes you with a pair of large eyes, hears you out, and then tells you more. Hand her the book you want and she smiles and slips it into a bag. Buying a used book, it turns out, can make a person that happy: you walk back out onto the walkway feeling you have done something good, in a fine mood.

As owner and sole employee, Ms. Uda walks over each morning from her rented apartment nearby, greets the shops next door and across the way, rolls up the metal shutter, and sets out the shelves and a small table. Before she has finished, someone has already pulled a book down and stands there reading it. Around noon she walks to a nearby shop for two rice balls and a side dish and eats back at the store. If a customer turns up while she is out, the shopkeeper next door watches the register for her. When no one is around, she sits and reads, takes notes, tidies the shelves, answers emails. At six in the evening she starts closing up, carrying the shelves back inside one by one and pulling down the shutter. She has been running this small bookstore for seven years.

Nine Years as a Clerk at a Big Bookstore

Ms. Uda graduated from the University of Tokyo's Faculty of Letters in 2002 and went straight to work for Junkudo, a well-known Japanese bookstore chain, at its Ikebukuro flagship store in Tokyo. The year before she joined, the Ikebukuro store had been rebuilt, doubling its floor space to 6,600 square meters and becoming, with one basement level and nine floors above ground, the largest physical bookstore in Japan. On the fourth floor, Ms. Uda ran the humanities section — philosophy, history, education, psychology, religion — handling stock-ins, returns, customers and shelving, day after day.

One day the store mounted a special feature on Okinawan books, shipping in books and magazines published locally in Okinawa. Until then Ms. Uda's impression of Okinawa had been much like most people's — some sense of it, and a lot of haze:

"I hadn't been to Okinawa at that point. Between the history and the U.S. military bases, the place felt complicated to me. So I thought that if I was going to Okinawa I should do some homework first — it's not somewhere you breeze into. But the kensanbon I saw in the store that day — books published within the prefecture — were so varied and colorful: cuisine, dance, karate, animals, customs... Their range opened my eyes. Every region in Japan has its small publishers, but in the sheer number of genres, contents, authors and publishing houses, Okinawa stands out. Nowhere else can match its appetite for publishing."

By her account, most regions in Japan outside big cities like Tokyo and Kyoto have no more than five publishers: one under the local newspaper, plus three or four others. Okinawa Prefecture — 2,281 square kilometers of land spread across more than 150 islands — has over a hundred. Two reasons lie behind this. First, during World War II and the U.S. occupation that followed,[1] "importing" books from Japan's main island of Honshu was especially difficult, which pushed Okinawa to grow its own publishing chain. Second, Okinawa's history and culture — its music, its food, its inherited rituals — differ so sharply from Honshu's that Okinawans hold a stronger sense of themselves than people elsewhere in Japan.

Interesting, certainly. But was that really why she later asked the company to transfer her to Okinawa? Would a young woman leave the big city and a life she was used to, and move somewhere she had no relatives and no particular ties, because she found kensanbon interesting? I had these doubts after reading her book Running a Bookstore Alone, so in 2017 I put the question to her. We had met at a forum at the Taipei Book Fair and arranged to have breakfast at a hotel café. She told me then: "Honestly, I applied for the Okinawa post out of despair." She said that and stopped. I didn't dare push, for fear of overstepping, but the line stayed with me for a long time. So this time, in 2018, I worked up the nerve to quote her own words back and ask what the "despair" had been about. Behind the register, Ms. Uda broke into a laugh:

"Goodness, did I really say that? 'Despair' is a bit much. How to put it — at the Ikebukuro flagship store, once I clocked in I was shut up on the fourth floor, inside the building from morning to night, hardly seeing daylight. Working in a bookstore isn't free at all: there's always more work, more boxes to process, and once you know the routine every day is the same thing over again, with no novelty in it. And as an employee working under a company's big name, sometimes when a customer said something to me I couldn't say what I thought was right. After work, or at weekends, I was so exhausted my soul had flown out of my body. I never managed to do anything out of the ordinary."

She was renting an apartment in western Tokyo then, next to an elevated road, with the drone of cars coming in at dawn and late at night alike. She wouldn't say she liked that commuting life, and as it happened, her relationship with her boyfriend had just ended. "So all of it mixed together, I suppose, and I simply went ahead and asked the company to send me down to help open the new branch in Okinawa."

Kensanbon

Okinawa may be inside the country, but it is a long way from Tokyo, and her boss at the time was alarmed enough to call her in and ask: had she found a boyfriend down in Okinawa, or something? She shook her head and held to her request. In 2009, her seventh year at the Tokyo flagship store, she moved to Naha, Okinawa Prefecture, and became deputy manager of the new branch. Because she already knew about Okinawa's kensanbon, she took particular care over buying, filling the shelves as far as she could with books that local publishers made for local readers. More than 80 percent of kensanbon readers are Okinawan, she says, and the books rarely make it to Japan's "mainland." Many Okinawan kensanbon do not even appear on Amazon — Japan's largest online bookstore too — so an odd sense of mission took hold of her: these books had to be pushed out to the whole country. But how do you track down kensanbon you can't even find online?

"Bookstores usually buy through toritsugi — wholesale distributors — who handle the ordering, the returns and the settlements for you. In Okinawa it's completely different. Local Okinawan publishers are small, for one thing; most are one-person operations run by the president alone. And there are so many of them: some start publishing out of nowhere and then vanish again after a while. On the whole they're hard to keep track of, and the distributors can't help either. So while I was at the Naha branch I sought out the members of the Okinawa Kensanbon Network[2] and got to know the local publishers one by one. Sometimes I'd spot an ad for a new book in the local paper, jot it down, and contact the publisher the moment I had a spare minute. Each of these local publishers has its own character and its own way of communicating, and their payment cycles and paperwork all have to be handled case by case."

Fiddly as these procedures were, she never found them a burden. Working her way step by step into the local publishing world was like walking into a mysterious, unpredictable tropical forest, and it called out her curiosity. But she was a company employee then, and the friction that sometimes arose between the company and local publishers troubled her. A big company has its own rules and procedures; local publishers have their own ways of doing things; between the two stood a wall that could never quite be climbed. Around this time, word went round the trade: the used bookstore Tokufuku-do, next to Makishi Market, was closing.

From 5,000 to 5.5

Ms. Uda's heart jumped when she heard. Tokufuku-do's shop floor was only 5.5 square meters — a scrap of nothing beside the 5,000-square-meter Junkudo Naha store where she then worked. Seen from another angle, though, the plot Tokufuku-do sat on was ideal for a small business: right on the main street of a bustling old market, with people passing all day, weekday or weekend — locals, domestic tourists, foreign tourists. "An employee of Japan's biggest bookstore takes over Japan's smallest bookstore" — she found the idea interesting, and workable. Before she had even asked about the rent or the terms of the lease, she had raised both hands. In 2011, her second year in Okinawa, she left Junkudo after nine years and became the successor to "Japan's smallest used bookstore."

The shop was already a used bookstore, but that did not mean she could simply move in. Before opening, Ms. Uda did her homework: she obtained the license required to deal in used goods (in Japanese, a kobutsusho kyoka), got her driver's license (needed for visiting people's homes to buy their book collections), joined the used-book trade association (formally the National Federation of Antiquarian Booksellers' Associations), built her own shelves by hand to save money, and learned her way around Okinawa's local used-book networks. Yet what stays with Ms. Uda most vividly from that period is none of that administrative work.

"In that stretch I felt keenly that I was, in a sense, 'nobody.' To rent this shop I had to sign a lease with the landlord, and the contract asked for an 'emergency contact.' That was when I realized I had no one suitable to put down — no one I could really call if something happened. My parents lived too far away, and I was single. Only then did I understand that once you step outside the identity of a company employee, you are truly on your own."

A new shop needs a name, and Ms. Uda thought about it for a long time before settling on Urara, a nickname from her childhood. Her surname, Uda, sounds a little like the opening "urara urara~" of "Neraiuchi" ("Sniper Shot"),3 the 1973 hit sung by Linda Yamamoto, and the boys in her elementary school loved to tease her with it. "I considered other options, but Urara — ウララ — struck me as something you'd remember the instant you saw it, and I also wanted to make peace with a bit of childhood trauma. So I settled on it. (laughs)"

Moving from a big bookstore to running a small one alone, what gives her the most satisfaction is the exchange with each customer. "At the big store, partly because I was always pressed for time, and partly because it only sold new titles, never used ones, if a customer wanted a book that had gone out of print there was simply no way to order it in. Now, facing those same customers, especially the older ones who aren't comfortable online, I can look the book up for them on used-book sites, or place the order myself. Booksellers give each other a 10 percent discount on trade, and that margin is my income. It isn't much profit, but doing something for a customer makes me happy."

The Trouble With Being an "Outlying Island"

This interview took place in the gaps of Ms. Uda's ordinary working day, so whenever a customer appeared I had to slip quietly away from her side — which let me watch a great deal of the detail of her work. I noticed a few small packages by her desk, waiting to be mailed to customers. She picked one up and said, "It wasn't until I opened a bookstore here that I realized how hard it is to 'cross the sea.'"

Online shopping, for instance: plenty of sellers advertise a flat nationwide shipping rate, but read the small print and there is a parenthesis — "excluding Okinawa and other outlying islands." And in recent years, as courier rates have climbed across the board, that has become one more headache for independent bookstores like Urara. Ordering new titles is the same story. When Ms. Uda wants a few new Okinawa-related books, some publishers tell her the order has to top 20,000 yen before they will ship it. "New releases are priced the same nationwide and the margins are thin, which is part of why I mainly sell used books here — used-book prices are freer. But new books are still different from used ones. They're new, they give off a fresh air, they have their own pull and vitality. So if there's something I especially love, or especially want to introduce to my customers here, I'll still order a few new titles."

On the subject of prices: most Japanese assume Okinawa is cheaper than the "mainland," but shopping in Okinawa's supermarkets and traditional markets on this trip I did not find that to be so — least of all with fruit and vegetables shipped in from the mainland, which cost more than in Tokyo. An apple grown in Nagano Prefecture, in central Japan, sells for around 100 yen (about 6 yuan) at an ordinary Tokyo supermarket and 150 yen at a Naha one; yogurt runs about 30 percent more. And while Okinawa's rents are somewhat lower than Tokyo's, though climbing fast in recent years, Okinawa's minimum wage is 762 yen an hour, 22 percent below Tokyo's 985 yen. Life there does not feel especially easy. Thanks to the resale price maintenance system,[4] books, magazines and newspapers carry the same price nationwide. So what about used books?

"Used books sell for more on average in Okinawa than elsewhere — maybe local demand for them runs higher. A used book that would fetch only 100 yen in Tokyo might sell for 500 yen here and still find a buyer. So we Okinawan used-book dealers sometimes 'stock up' from used-book stores outside the prefecture and still turn a profit hauling them here to sell. New-book prices are the same everywhere in Japan, but used-book prices vary from place to place. I find that interesting."

"Just look at the little shops around me. Some sell things made in Okinawa, but others sell Hokkaido kelp, Taiwanese fruit, Chinese tea, and I honestly can't tell you why they're selling that here. That's what a market is. My shop is the same: even if it has nothing to do with Okinawa, new or used, if I find it interesting I want to stock it and recommend it to customers."

The Future of Local Publishing

When we got onto kensanbon, Ms. Uda pulled a picture book off the shelf and handed it to me. Its author, its illustrator and its publisher are none of them Okinawan, so strictly speaking the book cannot count as kensanbon. But its design, its art and its text are steeped in the character of Okinawa, and in the store it clearly belongs under "Okinawa-related." As Ms. Uda explained, publishing today is more various than it used to be, and a book about Okinawa — a so-called "Okinawa book" — is no longer necessarily written by an Okinawan.

Walk back from Urara to Kokusai-dori, follow that street south for seven or eight minutes, and you reach a shopping mall; on the seventh floor is another chain bookstore, LIBRO. Every year it holds an Okinawa kensanbon fair, which turned twenty this year. In the past — especially before Junkudo opened its Naha branch — the fair was effectively the only occasion on which kensanbon all gathered in one place; crowds came, and the sellers sold plenty. Today several stores around the city specialize in kensanbon, each with sizable holdings of its own. "I hear LIBRO's fair may not happen next year," Ms. Uda told me, her expression a little complicated. Back when she was deputy manager at the Junkudo Naha store, building up the kensanbon collection was what she poured everything into; later, when she opened the small shop Urara, kensanbon remained one of its defining features. Everyone's life, work and choices ripple outward like a butterfly effect, touching other people and the wider society. The bookstore trade is no exception — if anything, it shows this more plainly than most.

Plenty else has shifted around kensanbon. Okinawa's small publishers are aging. Many presidents are past seventy and unwilling to hand an unprofitable business to their children. Editors face the same problem — as Ms. Uda put it, "Forty already counts as young, because the company has no one younger." Publishing's golden age has passed; writers with real craft and accumulated experience are retiring one after another, replaced by a lighter, more fashionable younger generation. They are good at taking their own interests and pushing them deeper, catching readers' eyes with tempting titles and page design, capturing the beauty of the local scenery, the slow pace of life, the local customs. As these highly personal "Okinawa books" multiply, the traditional kind of "Okinawa book" — and the writers able to handle "hard" subjects such as history, opposition to war, or opposition to the U.S. military bases — are fading from view.

About the future of local publishing and kensanbon, Ms. Uda is somewhat worried: "Ten years from now, say — what Okinawa's publishing world will look like, I honestly don't dare think about." But seen another way, she added, Okinawa's publishing scene, compared with the rest of Japan, is still fairly lively.

"Among kensanbon these days there are a lot of lifestyle magazines about Okinawa. Around ten years ago, Okinawa-themed magazines were folding one after another, and in the last few years they've picked up again. That said, a lifestyle magazine is much like a guidebook: the content has to be current, and once time passes it isn't so interesting anymore. So when I buy, I try to keep things varied. Lifestyle content is fine, but I also make sure to bring in something heavier — history, art. I want my store to reflect the whole of Okinawa, not only the surface image of a southern island; I want to show people something with more depth. Given where this shop sits, I think Urara can be an entrance — the place where people first begin to know Okinawa."

That is exactly what I admire most in Ms. Uda. She is not trying to be the best or the most famous independent bookstore in Okinawa. She is trying to be a small entrance, a doorway leading to something deeper — culture, history.

"My shop is so small it doesn't even have a set of the Okinawa Prefectural History, which every Okinawan used-book shop is supposed to carry. So the older hands in the trade sometimes criticize me; they joke that I only sell whatever moves easily. They're old-school, traditional used-book dealers, and to them I'm too breezy, not professional enough. But I really can't help it: my space is too small, and the world of used books is too deep. To collect those heavyweight volumes you'd need an enormous inventory, and I can't keep up with that alone. So I try to stay in touch with them, and if a customer wants something more serious I point them to another used-book shop or another way of finding it. Satisfying the customer as far as you can — that's what I learned at Junkudo. Junkudo's collection really was vast, its staff really were expert, but there were still inevitably books it hadn't stocked. When that happened we weren't allowed to brush a customer off with 'sorry, we don't have it.' We had to find a lead and give the customer something to go on. The idea was that even if you couldn't buy the book itself at Junkudo, a trip there should at least get you the information. Bookstore work keeps you busy; there's always a stack of unopened boxes from the distributor. But we still made the effort to look things up for customers. That was how Junkudo trained its staff, and it left a real mark on me."

An Okinawa in Flux, and Urara With It

In The Small Bookshop's Shelves, the essay serial she runs in the magazine Shosetsu Subaru, Ms. Uda tells the stories of her Okinawan life with a gentle, clear gaze — the daily lives of the market aunties, the fellow shopkeepers who came to help out while she was pregnant and raising her daughter, the Okinawan landscape her daughter grew up in. "Outsiders" like us read it with real pleasure, and between the lines you can trace the steady, patient way Ms. Uda has built her relationships in the local community. Now marking its seventh anniversary, Urara has won the recognition of fellow booksellers and book lovers and become an independent bookstore in Okinawa you cannot skip. Ms. Uda, who once spent whole days with no customers, sitting at the register reading and serving as a "living billboard for reading promotion," has in recent years seen both her physical store and her online sales steady, and her writing has borne fruit too. "At first my parents were really worried about my future and had a lot to say about it, but later, once they started seeing coverage of me in the media, or news of my books, or things I'd written, they stopped worrying."

But this settled stretch of life is about to meet a change: the Makishi Public Market across from Urara is going to be rebuilt. The market began as a postwar black market; in 1950 the Naha city government opened the Makishi Public Market to improve sanitary conditions. Spanning 3,573 square meters and packing in nearly 130 stalls side by side, it carries almost every cooking ingredient you could need — seafood, produce, meat — which earned it the nickname "Okinawa's kitchen." Now, seventy years on, the city government has decided to carry out a full renovation from 2019 to remove safety hazards. The new market will not be ready for another three years, perhaps five, and in the meantime the ground in front of Urara will be a construction site.

"The market itself is being rebuilt, but the row of shops I'm in isn't part of the market — it's privately owned land, so my store doesn't have to move. Still, the foot traffic here comes for the market, and it's hard for me to guess what business will be like once the market's gone. I'll just wait and see for now. To be honest, I'm even a little looking forward to the change."

Saying this, Ms. Uda's face was bright, untroubled. I think she can stay this calm because she has put down roots in Okinawa, with a solid, steady web of relationships around her.

"When I quit, almost everyone tried every way they could to talk me out of it, but I haven't regretted it to this day. In a few months, this traditional market right in front of me will be torn down, and I want to see this place's ending and its new beginning through. In the end, the only person who can make your own mood and your own life happy is you — that, and the small stories and conversations that happen around you every day. If you're not happy, it isn't because the city government or anyone else has treated you badly. If you want to live happily, you have to start from right where you stand, take it one day at a time, and treasure the ichigo ichie — the once-in-a-lifetime encounter — that comes through every single book."

Notes

[1]: The U.S. military took Okinawa's main island in 1945, and after Japan's defeat the following year the United States set up a military government in Okinawa. Under the 1951 Treaty of San Francisco, the Japanese government placed the Ryukyu Islands under U.S. trusteeship, and for twenty-seven years in all, until May 1972, Okinawa Prefecture remained under the administration of the United States and its military. Today the most common Okinawa-related news in the Japanese media concerns the U.S. bases. According to the Okinawa prefectural government's own web page on "U.S. military bases in Okinawa," the prefecture makes up less than 1 percent of Japan's total land area, yet 70 percent of the U.S. military bases in Japan still sit there, occupying 15 percent of the main island. That imbalance has caused Okinawans a great deal of trouble, held back economic development and damaged the environment; some Okinawans want the bases closed or moved outside the prefecture.

[2]: The Okinawa Kensanbon Network: a platform for Okinawan publishers to connect and promote kensanbon, established in 1994. As of a 2015 count it had 22 local Okinawan publishing houses as members.

[4]: The resale price maintenance system: a scheme written into an exemption clause of Japan's antitrust law to prevent cutthroat competition and disorder in the book trade. It allows publications to hold a fixed price for a set period, during which bookstores and other sales channels may not discount them on their own.

About the Subject

Uda Tomoko

Born in 1980 in Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan. After graduating from the University of Tokyo's Faculty of Letters she went to work at the Junkudo Ikebukuro flagship store, running the humanities section. She moved to Okinawa Prefecture in 2009, when Junkudo opened its new Naha branch. She resigned in July 2011 and opened Urara, the Used Bookstore in the Market, that November. Her books include Running a Bookstore Alone: Urara in the Naha Market (Border Ink, 2013) and Wanting to Open a Bookstore (Chikuma Primer Shinsho, 2015). She loves Latin American music and has one daughter.

Urara, the Used Bookstore in the Market

Address: 3-3-1 Makishi, Naha, Okinawa Prefecture

Hours: 11:00 a.m.-6:00 p.m. (closed Sundays and Tuesdays)

Website: Urara, the Used Bookstore in the Market

References

Wandering Through Impressions of Okinawa: by Tada Osamu (Chuko Shinsho, 2008)

"Urara, the Used Bookstore in the Market": an article in the online magazine CALEND OKINAWA (2012)

Running a Bookstore Alone: Urara in the Naha Market: by Uda Tomoko (Border Ink, 2013)

Wanting to Open a Bookstore: by Uda Tomoko (Chikuma Primer Shinsho, 2015)

"A History of Kensanbon": by Kina Erika, serialized in the newspaper Okinawa Times (2015)

The Small Bookshop's Shelves: by Uda Tomoko, serialized in Shosetsu Subaru (Shueisha, 2017-2018 portions)

About the Author

Yoshii Shinobu, a Japanese writer who writes in Chinese, currently lives in Beijing. She studied international relations at International Christian University in Japan, studied abroad in Chengdu, farmed in southern France, and worked as an economics news editor in Taipei, Manila and Shanghai, among other places. She now writes full-time; her books include Four Seasons, One Bento and Tokyo Bookstores, and she served as editorial reviewer for the "MUJI Simple Cooking" book series.