People Reading Fewer Books in Japan

Written By: guyjin on October 26, 2009 4 Comments

A recent Yomiuri survey showed that 7% fewer people were reading books compared with a year earlier. The survey asked respondents whether they had read a book in the past month, and 53% responded that they had not. This was almost as high as the mark of 54% in 2002.

Intuitively, it may be more believeable to think of young people reading less due to their use of the internet, games, etc. But it was the elderly that saw the greatest move away from books, with 70% of those 70 or older not reading a book in the past month, and 58% of those in their 60s. These figures were up 9% and 11% respectively compared to last year. For people in their 20s, more people were reading than not, with 41% responding that they had not read a book in the past month. The figures were 45% for those in their 30s, and 43% for people in their 40s.

When asked why they didn’t read, 51% responded that they didn’t have enough time, while 21% said that there wasn’t anything they wanted to read, and 18% said that they could ‘gain knowledge and information from other sources’.

Japan has a literacy rate of 99.0, according to the Human Development Index (which was reported on here last week – see Japan 10th Place and Falling in World Human Development Index). This is an assumed rate, since actual figures for adult literacy are not reported in Japan.

Personally, I still like to read books, but I also do a lot of my reading online, at a variety of different sources. A lot of people in Japan also spend a lot of time online on their cell phones, and this has given rise to a trend for ‘cell phone novels‘. These are novels that are generally written in short installments, which can be read easily on a cell phone. In 2007, five of the top ten selling novels in Japan were originally cell phone novels, and some have gained millions of hits in their online form. It is unclear whether cell phone novels (in their online form) were included in the above survey, but irrespective, they have led to a boom in ‘hard copy’ novel sales over the past several years, as the cell phone novels have been published to take advantage of their popularity.

In 2007, total sales in publishing in Japan were more than 2 trillion yen, which was down 3% over the year before, and back to 1990 levels. Book sales have been down year on year since their peak in 1996.