Morioka Shoten
On Wednesday, December 21, 2022, I visited Morioka Shoten on a small, hidden away street in the Ginza, near JR Yurakucho Station. It’s a bookstore, but the name “Morioka Shoten” only means Morioka Shop, and doesn’t identify it as a bookstore. I’ve known about Morioka Shoten for a few years from the newspaper and the internet. I never looked for it until December 21st when I had some time and suddenly, on a whim, I decided to seek it out. Among book people it is famous because it sells only one book.
That doesn’t describe what it really does. The shop sells only one title per week. Each week the title is changed. The shop is very small, a single room in the old and historic Suzuki Building. The manager’s idea is to bring readers together in one space for social interaction focusing on one choice of reading at a time, rather than in a conventional bookstore (where he used to work) where readers are overwhelmed with thousands of choices. The shop is primarily about face-to-face personal communication.
The shop also acts as a kind of gallery. The book that week was My Needlework Collection by Matsuura Kanae, a textile writer (you can find her on Amazon). She was on hand, talking to the few customers crowded into the space, and displaying some of her personal collection of needlework textile crafts.
Although I had the store on Google Maps on my phone, I appeared to be getting nowhere fast. So, after a couple hundred meters I returned to the station and sought help from a paper map and verbal directions at the Police Box there. Easy piecey after that.
The shop is open 1:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.