After feeling like I learned a lot about a specific Japanese perspective about the war, I decided to walk across town, through the book store neighborhood. It reminded me a lot of Paris along the Seine. Well, there are a couple of significant differences. The first is that here in Tokyo, there is not the beautiful backdrop of the Seine River while you look through old books. The second is that along the Seine, the book sellers are not really stores, but rather individuals selling from standup carts. Here on Yasukuni Dori (the name of the street), there is a long line of actual stores selling books.
There were only a couple of stores that had foreign books, but the selection was very limited. Instead there were many stores that sold antique books. Some books and sets were priced over a thousand dollars! It surprised me that there were so many specialty stores like this. Although there are used and antique book sellers in New York, it seems like there are not that many, and that they are not all in such a concentrated location. To be sure most of the stores on Yasukuni Dori were selling ordinary trade books (either used or new), and some some stores even focused on selling children's books, others magazines, others records, and even comics.
Even though I could not understand what the books were, I was still able to appreciate the beauty and value, and of course the smell, of all these old books.
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