A Tour of Okinawa's Small Bookshops: Opening the "Ideal Secondhand Bookstore" Is Genuinely Hard | Yoshii Shinobu's Second Round

"Yoshii Shinobu's Second Round" is a QDaily column by Yoshii Shinobu, a Japanese writer who works in Chinese. A "second round" (nijikai) is the optional gathering office workers move on to after the first bar closes out — a looser setting where people talk more freely.

Chihaya Shobo (hereafter Chihaya Bookstore) sits in Naha, Okinawa Prefecture, Japan. We have already visited Uda Tomoko's secondhand bookstore Urara; from there you walk to the prefectural government building and then about half an hour further west, and you arrive without much effort. There is a port and a seaside park nearby.

I came to Chihaya Bookstore with high expectations, because every small-bookshop owner I had spoken with in Okinawa praised it, with one voice, as the "ideal secondhand bookstore." Uda described it this way: "It has plenty of stock. Near the entrance are the lighter, more fashionable books, and the further back you go, the more you find books with real depth and interest. If I could, I'd want to run a shop like that myself."

Walking with the map in my hand, I suddenly noticed the shops around me had changed. The cute souvenir stores and the fashionable cafés had all but vanished, and in their place stood shops selling sexual services. It was getting dark, and the love hotels along the road were switching on their garish signs one after another. I began to suspect I had gone the wrong way, but the map insisted I hadn't. Five more minutes of walking, and there were the bookstore's lights.[1]

I slid open the glass door, nodded to the owner, and looked over the layout. Everyone had been right: this really is a typical (not in a bad sense), solid, dependable secondhand bookstore. Walking around, I noticed one shelf near the entrance that stood out — nothing on it but works by the manga artist Mizuki Shigeru (1922–2015).

"May I ask — do you collect Mizuki's work specifically?" The owner, Sakurai Nobushiro, laughed. "Yes. I've loved his work since third grade, so more than thirty years as a diehard fan. I still have six or seven hundred volumes at home; only the duplicates come to the shop to be sold, fewer than two hundred, probably. This past May the complete collection of Mizuki's manga[2] finally finished publication, and I bought the whole set. I doubt much more Mizuki material is coming after this, and that actually leaves me feeling hollowed out."

Nobody Believed Anyone Would Actually Buy It

"We opened this shop in December 2006, so it's been over ten years. Before that I did marketing for a telecom carrier in Miyagi Prefecture [note: in Japan's Tohoku region], covering the six Tohoku prefectures. It was 2005, I think, when a company physical found something wrong with my heart. It's not a serious problem now, it's fine, but at the time I was convinced I was going to die, and I wanted to do the one thing I really wanted to do before that happened. Partly it was that my wife and I had been coming to Okinawa on holiday once a year and we both loved the place, and partly that my hobby was browsing secondhand bookstores — every time I saw the owners I envied them, they looked so at ease. So: why not go open a bookstore in Okinawa. You know how it is. In most people's minds a secondhand bookstore owner just sits behind the register smoking, pets the cat, and waits for customers. Easy."

His wife backed the decision. She understood that he wasn't satisfied with the marketing job, and that you get one life, so she might as well help him make the dream real. One day, searching online, she came across a post shared by the well-known independent bookstore Utrecht, in Shibuya, Tokyo: "A bookstore in Okinawa is closing for good, and all of its stock, shelves and fixtures are up for auction on Yahoo Japan."

"As far as I know, opening a secondhand bookstore in Tokyo takes at least 10 million yen (about 620,000 yuan) in capital, and the auction price for the Okinawa shop wasn't nearly that much — about half, I'd say — so I bought it right away. I found out afterward that neither the seller [the original owner] nor his peers in the trade had expected anyone to actually buy it. The deal went through, the money changed hands, and they still couldn't believe it. Not until our whole family turned up here, bags in hand, did people believe we were serious."

What the original owner "sold" Sakurai wasn't only the stock — it was also the craft of the business and the connections. He walked Sakurai through the daily workings of a secondhand bookstore, item by item, and introduced him to the local veterans of the trade. Half a year before the Sakurais moved to Okinawa, Tokufukudo — later taken over by Uda and renamed Urara, "Japan's smallest secondhand bookstore" — had also opened.

Okinawa's veterans looked after Sakurai and the owner of Tokufukudo alike. Amaku Hitoshi in particular, the manager of BOOKS JINON in Ginowan City and a heavyweight in the Okinawan secondhand book trade, felt that if he failed to look after these "rookies" from the mainland, it would eventually reflect on the whole trade in Okinawa. So he told them everything about buying and selling used books, one item at a time: sourcing channels, pricing, cataloguing, and the relationships that mattered.

Sakurai said: "I'd never worked in a bookstore before. Without the care and instruction of those veterans, there's no way I'd have got through the hardest first few years. What matters most, I think, are these connections you can't buy with money, and relationships you can actually trust."

"The shop I bought had been open twenty years under the name Bunkado. The owner decided to sell because he wanted to go into real estate with his older brother. Only afterward did I discover that about half the stock was pornographic — magazines, novels, discs. I've nothing against that kind of material myself, but whether to sell it in my own shop is another question. My daughter was small at the time, and I didn't want her growing up embarrassed by what was in the shop. So I sold all of it to other dealers at an auction run by the secondhand booksellers' association (officially, the All-Okinawa Antiquarian Booksellers' Cooperative)."

Following his own tastes, Sakurai first stocked the shop mainly with modern and contemporary literary fiction, plus a batch of Mizuki Shigeru, and it "sold terribly." What did sell was the stock he had bought from the previous owner, including the "Okinawa books" — publications about Okinawan culture, history and customs. Sakurai began to see that his collection needed rebalancing, and just then an opening appeared.

"Along with the physical shop, I inherited an online store from the previous owner, and back then most of our income came from online sales. Later, around 2007 to 2008, several old secondhand bookstores in Naha closed one after another — some owners went back to the outlying islands to retire, some couldn't manage physically anymore, some simply couldn't keep the business going. The surrounding secondhand bookstores scrambled to buy up their stock, and I picked up some 'Okinawa books' too. Right now the shop holds roughly twenty thousand volumes, of which 'Okinawa books' make up a third to a half, and the rest is literature. Then there are the lifestyle books and picture books my wife handles, which also sell well. So at the moment income splits about fifty-fifty between online and the shop. Even so, overall income hasn't climbed. If anything, it feels like high-priced secondhand books were easier to sell in the past."

By Sakurai's account, the shop's main customers aren't necessarily locals. They include university teachers from all over, people doing Okinawa studies, staff from art museums and museums, schoolteachers, and sometimes a television crew that comes in to buy books they want as reference for a programme.

"My collection still leans one way, but I think that's fine. There are several other secondhand bookstores nearby — ones specializing in photography and art books, and old-established shops with tens of thousands of Okinawa-related and antiquarian titles — and I can point customers toward those more specialized shops. I just hope people start at my shop and end up interested in Okinawa."

"In this trade, sourcing matters a great deal. When I started I had no other channel and relied entirely on the bimonthly auctions run by the booksellers' association. Then, little by little, people began phoning to ask me to come to their homes and buy books. I imagine they saw how many 'Okinawa books' I had in the shop and thought of selling me their own collections. My main channel now is 'buying in' — buying used books from ordinary households — but that isn't steady either. Last month, for instance, nobody called me to 'buy in' for about three weeks, and I genuinely felt uneasy. Then this week someone finally rang to fix a time, and I relaxed."

Okinawa's "Mutual Aid Societies"

On this tour of independent bookstores in Okinawa I came across an institution particular to the local secondhand book trade, called moai. It is a private arrangement: a group of people each pay a sum into a shared pool every month, and members take turns drawing on it — a mutual aid society. Something similar existed once in Tokyo and elsewhere in Japan, but it disappeared long ago.

Moai is a common habit of Okinawan life. Small ones let friends save up drinking money — once enough has accumulated, everyone goes out drinking together — or money for a trip; large ones are for buying a house or starting a business. Members pay in anywhere from 5,000 to 100,000 yen a month, and whoever takes the whole pot starts paying interest on top of their contribution the following month, continuing to fund the payouts for everyone else.

The one Sakurai belongs to is called Shoyukai, a moai set up by the owner of Bunkado, with twelve members at present. Each pays 20,000 yen (about 1,200 yuan) a month; take the pot this month and from next month you pay 21,000 yen — so the later a member's turn comes, the more they receive. Sakurai says the group has genuinely helped him: "Say next month my car has to go through its inspection[3], and the household budget goes out of balance — being able to borrow from Shoyukai at a time like that makes life much easier. Of course this kind of arrangement carries risk. People have taken the money and vanished; it happens. In one moai I belonged to, an elderly member took the payout and then died. There was nothing to be done — we treated it as condolence money."

Beyond the money, moai give members detailed trade information and close personal ties. Shoyukai meets once a month, rotating between members' shops, where they bring out their own stock to trade and swap all kinds of industry news over conversation.

"My previous job was marketing at a telecom company, where competition between rivals was fierce and there were almost no unwritten rules — we'd do anything to land business. I got used to that atmosphere, and then I moved to Okinawa and met the booksellers here, and it felt like a different country altogether. I don't know whether everyone in the secondhand book trade is like this, or whether it's Okinawa, but I think it has to do with the temperament and habits of Okinawan people. They seem to reckon that since everyone is about equally capable, you may as well help each other. That's probably the thinking. Uda from Urara is a Shoyukai member too, and I'd guess she felt that same atmosphere here in Okinawa, which is what gave her the courage to open a shop on her own. People still have their limits, mind you: try to buy someone's stock and ask for a slightly lower price, and sometimes they won't come down a single yen. They're serious where it counts. But on the whole everyone is willing to lend a hand."

Sakurai comes across as gentle, and he has a sense of humor. We talked and talked, and before we knew it closing time had come. Before we ended the interview he said there was one last thing he wanted to say: "The way I talk probably isn't very serious, and people reading this interview might come away thinking running a secondhand bookstore is easy and relaxed. I thought so too at first — that if I worked a bit harder the money would come. It doesn't work like that. I want to stress this: opening a secondhand bookstore and keeping it going is genuinely hard. Unless you have real staying power, don't try. In the first two or three years especially I felt I was letting my wife and children down, because our income dropped straight to a third of what it had been. If you can bear that kind of pressure, then go ahead and try it. Because I still think running a secondhand bookstore is the best job in the world — if only the income were a bit higher (laughs)."

Notes

[1] The author later learned that the Wakasa district and the adjoining Tsuji district make up a well-known bar street within Naha. Before Naha was destroyed by American bombing in October 1944, this area had been a red-light district with more than four hundred years of continuous history. One novel set in these pleasure quarters is The Flowers of Tsuji (《辻之华》), by Uehara Eiko.

[2] The Complete Manga Works of Mizuki Shigeru was published by Kodansha under the supervision of Kyogoku Natsuhiko, released between June 2013 and May 2018. It collects all of Mizuki's manga across 103 volumes, plus five supplementary volumes and five additional volumes.

[3] Japan's vehicle inspection system is officially called the Motor Vehicle Inspection and Registration System. A new car must pass it in its third year, and every two years after that, at a cost of around 100,000 yen.

About the Interviewee

Sakurai Nobushiro

Born in 1973 in Miyagi Prefecture. After graduating from a local university he joined the Tohoku regional subsidiary of the mobile carrier NTT DOCOMO. He quit in 2005 and moved to Okinawa Prefecture. In 2006 he opened Chihaya Shobo.

Chihaya Shobo

Location: 1F, 3-2-29 Wakasa, Naha, Okinawa Prefecture (on Wakasa Odori, across from Naha Junior High School)

Hours: 10:00–20:00 (closed Mondays)

Website: Chihaya Shobo

About the Author

Yoshii Shinobu is a Japanese writer who works in Chinese, currently living in Beijing. She graduated from International Christian University in Japan with a degree in international relations. She has studied in Chengdu, farmed in southern France, and worked as an economic-news editor in Taipei, Manila and Shanghai. She now writes full-time; her books include Four Seasons Bento (《四季便当》) and Tokyo Bookshops (《东京本屋》), and she served as an editorial reviewer for the "MUJI Simple Cooking" book series.