Today (Wednesday 7/23) in Japan at 3pm Minoru Morita will be talking to the foreign press and other members of the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan about his explosive new book, Curing Japan's America Addiction. Here's the summary from the FCCJ's website:

Long considered one of Japan's leading political analysts, Minoru Morita's first book translated into English makes no bones about its premise -- that the Koizumi Cabinet, and its ties to the Bush Administration, have destroyed the nation's middle class. Morita says tensions between the countries are growing, and the book was translated into English so that Americans would better understand Japan's political situation.

The 75-year-old author says in the book's first sentence that Japan is on the verge of its greatest political crisis in history. With a general election coming within a year and support for the Fukuda Cabinet still low, make your reservations early as the veteran Nagatacho-watcher predicts how the saga will play out.

If you can't make it to the event in Tokyo, then order the $15 book directly from us and get it shipped free anywhere in the US and Canada or for just $5 anywhere in the world.

I'm getting my first glimpse of our new title, Curing Japan's America Addiction, today. I'm in Tokyo for the official launch of the book this Thursday at the Ru Paul Hotel (OK, it's actually Le Port, but in katakana it reads like Ru Paul). I'm — gulp — supposed to deliver a short speech in Japanese before Mr. Morita's keynote lecture, which is why I arrived a few days early to see if I can still speak Japanese (turns out I can, thank god).

We'll have promos up on the site and special offers to our faithful readers throughout August. If you want a fascinating read on why Koizumi's structural reforms are destroying Japan's middle class and a reminder of just how horrible a president George Bush was — I mean have you read this?! — then this is a book for you. I think we could all use a little detox after the last eight years (but wait, while we're all in detox, they'll bomb Iran...).

Here's Morita quoted on Bloomberg on Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda's performance at the recent G-8 summit in Hokkaido:

"He tried to gain points domestically by addressing Japan-specific issues, misunderstanding what it means to chair a summit conference,'' Morita said. "The impression that he gave of Japan to the outside world is that they are egotistical and inward- looking.''

And here's Mr. Morita without the polite media filter on the same subject in a column translated by Chin Music Press:

The G-8 Hokkaido Toyako Summit was an enormous waste. Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda was powerless and showed no leadership. He was dragged about, used and trampled upon by US President George W. Bush.

President Bush forced America's egoism down everyone's throats. He carried through with his "if I'm OK, who cares about the rest?" philosophy. The US flexed its muscles. All the other political leaders were powerless before him. As summit chair, Fukuda was especially pitiful, trying to read Bush's every whim.

Look for more on the book soon. We'll be dealing them out of the back of a van in Kabukicho for a few days, but then we should have a proper link on the site for the rest of the world to buy it.

And so our little Hitotoki family grows once again!

After a long, top-secret incubation period, Hitotoki Sofia is now live. How we longed to scream to the world that this was in the works. Our mouths were sealed lest we break any number of iron-clad Bulgarian NDAs, all composed by a lawyer wearing nothing but tuxedo pants and living off carrots and dip for weeks on end. All this to ensure maximum excitement upon launch. None of us have ever been to Sofia, but based on the small number of Bulgarians we've met (lawyer included) and the stories they managed to collect for the launch of this city, I think it's safe to say Sofia is one of the undiscovered bastions of Eastern European wonder and gentility.

This edition was expertly curated and translated by Konstantin Vulkov and his team at Bulgarian National Darik Radio. We wish to thank him and his staff for all their hard work in bringing the world a little bit closer to Sofia.

Some select quotes from the launch entries:

001:

I like her because Ginka, Binka or Dochka, or whatever her name is, is the singular inhabitant of the stretch who could be possibly called “normal”. I like her and I hate her. For the same reason.

003:

Well, it was not a Cadillac, it was not even a Mercedes, it was not even a Ford, it was just a Wartburg. So from that moment there were two cars on our street. My father’s Wartburg, and the Cadillac of His Excellency. And the Saturday afternoons received a new meaning. My father and I started to wash the car together, with a hose and a soft brush, with soap-suds, the Wartburg started to shine fabulously. It was an enemy worthy of the huge Cadillac’s steel.

004:

I did not only hear the bells, I felt them with every inch of my body. There was something grand in that moment, at least this is how I felt it.

An editorial note:
For Hitotoki Sofia we've left all editorial nuance, spelling and grammar up to the Bulgarian team. This means that some of the phraseologies and word usages are somewhat ... unorthodox. We feel this is all part of the fun of bringing the voice and spirit of the city to a broader audience and hope you enjoy reading it as much as we did organizing it.

It's been a long while since we've had some fresh coffee prose brewing over at cannedcoffee.com, but thanks to Ted Taylor, this week it's all about love, dishonesty, that oppressive rainy season air and the inspirational lyrics of The Monkees. Check it out.

While newspapers gut their book coverage, NPR is expanding its coverage online. And it has good Jessa Crispin of bookslut fame as one of the reviewers. Smart move.

I don't think it's a coincidence that nonprofit news media like NPR see the potential for growing book coverage while most for-profit papers are gnashing their teeth and bemoaning falling advertising rates. It's simple — we need more nonprofit journalism and less focus on shareholders and profit margins. Some things — like investigative journalism, health care and education— just don't work very well under our capitalist system, me thinks.

The Kindle is about to have some competition. The Readius is the size of a cellphone but a 5-inch screen can be pulled from it to read books, magazines, newspapers, et cetera. Plus, and here's the real value added over the Kindle, it is both durable and flexible. From The New York Times:

Mr. O’Rourke of the Flexible Display Center likes the look of the new generation of supple screens, but he also likes their toughness. “Some of them we’ve beaten with hammers, and they still run,” he said. “No one could do that with a BlackBerry.”

And this is just the beginning, O'Rourke believes. "It’s an exciting example, but there are going to be a slew of other devices coming soon, too,” the paper quotes him as saying.

Read the whole story and see a picture of the Readius here.

Saw this on the Shelf Awareness newsletter and wanted to pass it on. It's from a newsletter by the independent bookstore Diesel, in the Oakland, CA, area:

With Independence Day celebrations beginning it seems as good a time as any to celebrate our independents. With the closing of several prominent, internationally-recognized bookstores in the last couple of months--Dutton's in Brentwood, Cody's Books and the Graduate Theological Bookstore in Berkeley--it seems important to take stock of where independent bookselling stands, what it stands for, and what stands against it. Simply put, many stores like ours are doing well, supported by dedicated, intelligent communities of readers who understand the pleasures, virtues, and vital services neighborhood bookstores offer. The closures of these stores should not be misread as some fateful indication of the inevitable decline of independent businesses. However, they do reveal the risks threatening independent businesses these days: escalating overhead costs including rent; reader choices gravitating toward media-encouraged internet purchasing; publisher accommodation to the pressures from increasingly consolidated clients (Amazon, Costco, Walmart, chains) leveraging their power to secure preferential terms. All of these forces work against the greater health of the culture and combine to threaten neighborhood bookstores. Most of them can be alleviated through very simple acts: do not heed the media's predictions and recommendations for 'consumer' behavior; do not increase, through your purchases, the centralised power of large internet and chain companies which distort the markets of cultural goods; and support your local stores. (For more on independent bookstores, check out IndieBound.) Please excuse the rant, but it just has to be said. We hope you enjoy our recommendations and have a summer full of wonderful books.

Well put. Happy 4th all you Americanos!

Here's a summer reading list from World Changing. Glad to see a Chin Music title sneak into the pack!

Peter Goodman over at Stonebridge Press has the fever. Obama fever, that is. Check out his line of Obama kana products — shirts, mugs and hats with"Obama" spelled out in hiragana. Better yet, buy some, and make this an internationally flavored 4th of July weekend.

Here's a great story on Book Expo America and the constant hand-wringing of large book publishers by Paul Constant. His argument pretty much boils down to this: Large publishers are cowardly crowd-followers; readers are as hungry as ever for good literature and tired of being talked down to by the cowardly large publishers; and this has created a huge opportunity for small presses and indie bookstores.

It's funny, but in this ecosystem, the "small" publishers he refers to are the very ones we look up to: Akashic, Small Beer, McSweeney's, Soft Skull. We're saving up to someday be able to afford a booth at BEA, so I guess that puts us in the teeny-weeny press category, a garage band of sorts. But all the same, I think his argument holds true. The old venues for reviews and publicity are becoming less and less relevant, and today's small press has to be nimble enough to get its books talked about in other venues. Readers will respond, as we've found in our tiny slice of the publishing world. And the good thing is we're still being discovered.

Constant made me laugh out loud several times in this piece, like when he contemplates facing the apocalypse at Larry King's house:

I grab a beer and slip back inside the house. Unsurprisingly, there are some books by Larry King on the bookshelves—I resist the urge to see if they are lovingly inscribed from Larry to Larry. Though the shelves probably cost more than my father made in six months at his job in a paper mill, the collection of books is roughly identical to my parents'. There are some mysteries, a couple of inspirational-type books, a dictionary. There's a People Magazine Almanac from 2006. I imagine what would happen if, like in the TV show 24, an atomic bomb went off in Los Angeles and all these people and I wound up duct-taped into Larry King's house, waiting out the fallout. We wouldn't suffer for food, of course. There's enough bison and cheese for everyone, so the class struggle wouldn't turn to violent cannibalism or anything like that. There's enough booze to keep us insensate through the apocalypse, too. But the books. The few times in my life when I've been deprived of books, I've become monstrous and depressed, as though going through physical withdrawal. What would I read if I wound up trapped in here for a few weeks? I look at Larry King's shelves. There is nothing that interests me. It is a barren wasteland, and if I had to subsist on it, I'd die.

Thanks to Akira at Design Kompany for bringing the article to my attention.

The Daily Yomiuri ran an upbeat review of our latest addition to the Chin Music family, Art Space Tokyo. The reviewer sums up our book this way:

Art Space Tokyo is a snapshot of the Tokyo art world as it is now. But with forward-looking organizations such as the new contemporary art fair 101 Tokyo and Art Initiative Tokyo hoping to break new ground, Art Space Tokyo may also help to better understand the city's future.

Damn straight. Thanks DY.

Chapter 8 of Curing Japan's America Addiction as seen through the eyes of Wordle, a word cloud generator created by Jonathan Feinberg.

CJAA will be available for purchase in a few weeks time.

Khoi Vinh over at Subtraction has written a lovely and flattering short review of Art Space Tokyo:

Whenever it is that I’ll finally get an opportunity to make it to Japan, I plan to take with me a copy of “Art Space Tokyo,” an unexpectedly stunning bit of cultural travelogue from Chin Music Press...

We've also updated our Tokyo Art Map offerings with a new PDF download for Ghibli Museum near Kichijoji.

There are a few other AST related magazine articles, web interviews and party updates that we'll be announcing in the coming weeks. For now though, we have to keep our heads down and continue cranking out Curing Japan's America Addiction.

The books cleared Customs and arrived in Seattle today. Off to the warehouse and on to bookstores soon. The book is officially a September release, but look for it to stop popping up in bookstores later this summer. And if you're in New York City, try the International Center for Photography, which has a limited supply right now.

As many of you know, our next book, out this summer, is called Curing Japan's America Addiction by long-time political analyst Minoru Morita. The book is the first I know of to connect the disastrous legacy of the US Republicans beginning with Ronald Reagan to the disastrous legacy of privatization and inequality left by former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi. To paraphrase Morita, while Koizumi had the telegenic charm of a Reagan, he had the business sense of George Bush, and now Japan is suffering dearly for it.

But all is not lost. A lot of Morita's book talks about the coming changing of the guard in the US and, eventually, in Japan. Before the US midterm election, Morita predicted in a speech we put in the book that the Bush legacy was finished and that the next American president would either be a Democrat or a Republican of a very different ilk.

In a Washington Post piece out last week, Morita was asked for his thoughts after Barack Obama all but wrapped up the Democratic nomination for president. Here's what he said:

"The primaries showed that the US is actually the nation we had believed it to be, a place that is open-minded enough to have a woman or an African American as its president."

There has been so much negative news emanating from the White House and from the boardrooms of US corporations for eight years it is almost hard to remember that much of the world is cheering for us. We blew the sympathy and goodwill the world showed for us after 9/11 like a crack addict blows through pocket change, but maybe this time we'll realize that after all the crap, it won't take that much to win the world back.

A French friend of mine told me that the joke in France these days is that they should be very, very quiet about how much they love Obama lest the Republicans start to use that against him. The world is ready to love — or at least like — us again. Maybe this time, we'll respond in kind. As Winston Churchill said, "You can always count on Americans to do the right thing — after they've tried everything else."

We're at the point where we are starting to grow but still seem constantly strapped for cash. Every upstanding businessperson knows that there's only one solution to keep us growing: Interns, interns, interns!

So if you're looking for long hours of hard, anonymous work, if you're dream is to talk on the phone with a writer who is pretty ticked off that his book isn't in the Tacoma Barnes & Noble, if you'd like nothing better than to spend your summer trudging to the post office to mail off elaborately packaged cans of coffee or if picking up my egg salad sandwich on your way back from Office Max to stock up on padded envelopes sounds like almost too much fun, then don't hesitate to give us a buzz at 206-784-4700.

In all seriousness, we have an array of potential positions and assignments to offer ranging from low pay to no pay. We're looking for production people (web designers, graphic designers, editors, proofreaders), marketing and sales people and maybe an MBA student or two who want to show us all the basic business mistakes we make every day (and lord knows, there are a lot of them). At this point, none of these positions are full-time (I believe it's illegal to have full-time nonpaid interns, is it not?), but you never know — if we keep on this pace, we'll be able to add staff in the not-too-distant future.

Also, while some of our jobs require people to be in the Puget Sound area, others could be done from Timbuktu. Don't let geography dissuade you.

So call us, send your resume to me at bruce at chin music press dot com, and we'll take it from there.

While reading an article on the design process for FF Meta Serif, I came across this passage which struck me as particularly hilarious. If you can understand this, you probably know too much about typography for your own good.

Kris was more inclined to turn Meta Serif into a slab – a pretty literal take – basically Meta with ever so slightly trapezoidal serifs tacked on. Christian’s sketch took it firmly into Antiqua territory (‘Antiqua’ being the common German name for serif faces, as opposed to ‘Grotesk’ which means sans serif) by increasing the contrast and adding bracketed serifs. Christian tried to keep as many of the salient features intact as he could, yet his design was definite departure from Meta. The slab was closer to what Erik and Christian had discussed in the past, but Christian’s grand plan (and the underlying reason why he thought Meta Serif should be an Antiqua) was to draw Unit Slab as well, and let that one be a real Egyptian. That way they would end up with a serif and slab that could be used together and be compatible with both FF Meta and FF Unit.

Just a quick note to let everyone know that we're increasing our Tokyo art world coverage at the Art Space Tokyo blog. Very simply we'll be posting more short snippets of news, events and information pertaining to art in Tokyo. Ashley has already begun with two nice little nuggets about the 2009 plans for 101Tokyo, and Louis Vuitton / Murakami collaborations. Pop by, check it out, and subscribe to our feed for the latest updates.

Borders recently launched its new website, which features the Magic Shelf, the latest riff on online book shopping. I haven't had time to poke around yet, but it's clear that Borders is taking a decidedly simpler, less statistic-cluttered approach than Amazon.

The Magic Shelf has some interesting features that might play better with a large indie like Powell's. For example, the Staff Recommend shelf seems like a good idea; that's the first section I go to when visiting a good indie store. But at Borders, who really knows who the staff is? On the Magic Shelf, you pass your cursor over the recommended titles and you only get typical publisher blurbs on the books — no staff reviews. But still, it's interesting to see a new twist in online selling.

See if you can find the artspacetokyo.com reference buried in this New York Times blog. It's official: we exist in the eyes of the gray lady!