Japan's Libraries & Book Towns

About this book

Japan reads in public — and this is the map of where.

Japan's Libraries & Book Towns covers 200 libraries, book districts and reading places in one traveller's format: the library and its place, its history and collection, how to visit and read there, and the practical notes that belong to that place. The National Diet Library under the Diet's hill and the children's library inside a 1906 brick palace in Ueno. Osaka's 1904 stone library on Nakanoshima, Gifu's Media Cosmos, Toyama's Kirari, Sendai's Mediatheque, the rebuilt libraries of the tsunami coast. And in Part 5, the places that are not quite libraries: Jimbocho, the densest used-book town on earth; antiquarian fairs in shrine forests; manga museums with their complete works open on the shelves; Tadao Ando's forests of children's books; a hotel you sleep in inside a bookshelf.

It is honest where a guide must be. This book does not print opening hours or lending terms as facts — libraries change them, so every entry closes with the same instruction to confirm the latest official information locally before you go. And it tells you plainly, entry by entry, what a visiting reader can and cannot do: reading inside is open to anyone; borrowing is normally for the town's registered readers.

A companion to Museums of Japan in the same series, deliberately kept apart: where a museum appears here, it appears only as a reading place.

Written and created in Japan by Japanese author Aki Wakamatsu. Published by Takikawa TOKOTOKO Kids LLC, a Japanese publisher in Hokkaido, Japan. Authentic Japanese content, carefully made in Japan — not mass-produced.