Some of us write for magazines. I do. In which case, I have got to be interested in what is happening on the Japanese magazine scene today. In brief, they are on fire. The whole darned industry is in flames. What’s the problem? The magazines have lost a whole wad of ad money. What was there ain’t there any more. There are something like 3,600 titles published in Japan and there are about 4,000 publishing houses (including book publishers). This is probably the largest magazine community in the world. Well, they are at risk as we speak. Magazines here are an endangered species – and that includes the famous manga. Yep, the comics are at risk. Dragonball, watch your ass.

No one is safe at this point. This was brought home to me by my friend Tetsuya Okubo of Shueisha, the No. 1 publisher of manga in Japan. He and I have been meeting weekly for six years. In theory, he is my “student,” polishing his English. In practice, he is my sensei, teaching me the ins and outs of his trade. He knows his stuff.

I guess I began to get the gist of the problem a year ago. That was when Tetsu invited me to a conference about magazines and their digital future. All this wasn’t especially new to me. I had just come off a five-year stint at economist.com, covering the contemporary art scene for them here. They paid shit, but they were lovely to work for. For five years, we had a ball. Come the day of judgment when the management of economist.com decided to pull the rug, did I receive a little letter to say thanks and bye for now? Welcome to digital manners.

When Tetsu invited me to his conference last November, I went out of duty. I had no feeling that digital would save the day. My feeling was the opposite; I thought that digital would be the knell of doom.

Not so fast. Let Yuko Tanaka of Nikkei BP speak. She has been working on digital themes with Tetsu. The two of them together are formidable. This is what this polished lady has to say. Sales of magazines have been falling for the last 13 years, according to Yuko. There has been a gradual decrease; it’s not something that happened overnight. In the beginning, everybody thought sales would pick up. The publishers were not really affected by the overall decline, because advertising stayed level. And their manga sales kept going, comic books being very important in Japan. However, she says, “When the global recession hit in 2008, all of a sudden (magazines) lost a huge chunk of money.”

This was the “direct cause” of publishers coming together to work on “something digital.” Even before the recession hit many of the publishers were working on their own on “something digital.” However, two factors gave them pause: One was that a large amount of capital was required; the other, the fact that this was a totally new business for publishers of print magazines. In conclusion, the big publishers who had been working on their own decided to get together with the smaller publishers. This was the background that brought together a plethora of Japanese publishers – plus others from the rest of Asia, the United States and Europe – for the November conference a year ago. The stage managers? You’ve guessed it – my friends Yuko and Tetsu.

‘TIME TO COME TOGETHER’
Tsuguhiko Kadokawa, chairman of Kadokawa Group Holdings, made a bold suggestion. It was time, he said, for “magazine publishers in Japan to come together and build a common digital platform.” Publishers here are not known to love each other. Quite the contrary. They are bitter enemies. It is a measure of the times that they would gather together in such a way. However, one closing keynote speech would change nothing, I thought. But I was wrong. The Kadokawa remarks triggered a movement. It suddenly struck everyone that it made no sense for each of the publishers to create their own platforms. “That would be like going to a bookstore that had magazines for just one publisher,” Yuko explained. “The perfect goal must be to try the whole lot in one bookstore – that is, on one platform for everybody.”

As an outcome of the conference last November, Japanese magazine publishers decided to work on a “common platform” and the distribution of digital content. Everything works in Japan, if you structure in some formalities. This is what Tetsu and Yuko did, in consultation with magazine-publishing industry chiefs. These folk gather together in something called the JMPA – the Japan Magazines Publishers’ Association. All the big-name publishers belong to it. The chairman is Toru Ueno of Bungei Shunju. He and industry leaders agreed to a formal step, which was to set up an ancillary body: the Digital Content Promotion Committee, which was launched in January 2009. The chief driver is none other than my friend Tetsu, who became its chairman.

What does this committee do? It marshals the resources of the industry. It gathers everybody around “to work on managing magazine content copyrights” and “build new business models in the face of the digitalization trend.” It actually does much, much more. I saw this at one of the meetings of the JMPA committee in July. Within minutes of arriving, there was standing room only. Tetsu made some introductory remarks. Then it was the turn of the working-group chiefs. One by one they stood up. The guys were impressive. In their 40s to 50s mostly, they came across as leaders in their fields. There was no denying that they were serious. Everyone there was ready for a bit of a revolution. That is what it would take to put out the fires. This was a big deal, I thought, but too big for the JMPA alone.

So it came to pass. One day in the early summer, I began to hear word of a “consortium” being set up. This new body – the Consortium for Digital Promotion of Magazine Content – would take over the running of affairs. Tetsu and Yuko had expanded the scope of the original JMPA committee to include an array of non-publishing – but publishing-related – firms, such as printing companies Toppan and Dai Nippon. These are among the largest printing companies in the world. Quite quickly, the consortium built up its membership to include more than 40 magazine publishing companies and over 40 non-publishing firms.

They had a first gathering on Aug. 5 at the Japan Publishers Club near Iidabashi and came up with seven areas of concern:
1. Preparation of unified rights agreements for magazine content and examination of how to share royalties.
2. Development of unified file format for magazine content and examination of workflows.
3. Preparation of database of magazine content (current and back issues, archive, metadata, etc.).
4. Magazine content portal site (PC/cell phone) and industry-wide micropayment system.
5. Devices dedicated to magazine content, new ways of viewing/providing magazine content.
6. Maximization of advertising revenue and globalization.
7. Domestic and international promotion.

What about funding? Well, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications came up with ¥59 million for the current fiscal year, while private companies were to cough up ¥600,000 each, per year. At the end of September, there were 44 publishing members and 40 non-publishing members. I asked Yuko about the consortium members. They include Yahoo, but not Google.

‘A TIME OF HUGE CHANGE’
To improve my understanding of this whole project, I asked Yuko if she could introduce some of the working group leaders to me. She did so. They were: Hisashi Ayukawa of Kadokawa Group, a leading force in the consortium; Haruki Kajiwara of Fusosha Publishing – his firm is part of the powerful Fujisankei Group; and Takuo Murase, a lawyer who works for Shinchosha Publishing and specializes in copyright issues. They came to the Press Club on September 29 for an hour-long interview.

Ayukawa-san summed up his vision, saying that he is enamored of the plans to develop a common or shared platform with other publishers. Magazine publishing, he considers, is going through the biggest change since the time of Gutenberg, half a millennium ago. “This is a time of huge change,” he said, and, he warned, Japanese publishers had better acknowledge this. New developments in America – notably the creation of Amazon’s Kindle and other types of e-books – were transforming the industry at pell-mell speed. “This is the first time that Japanese publishers have worked together as one,” he remarked.

I asked Kajiwara-san of Fusosha whether there is any other country where magazine publishers have come together on such a grand scale. He thought not. Murase-san of Shinchosha remarked that in the U.S., where there are “big media conglomerates,” there are always teams “working on digital platforms within the group, while in Japan the magazine publishers are not that big.” He remarked that “maybe Kadokawa and Shogakukan could just about do it alone.” Kajiwara-san commented that in future, magazine articles could be offered around the world. “We have to create a (universal Japanese) bookstore” with content-indexed articles, to enable instant retrieval, he suggested.

Murase-san, the lawyer in the group, has been working mainly on copyright issues. “In Japan, publishers don’t have any rights,” he commented. There are so many rights holders. In magazines, there are writers with text rights, photographers with their own rights. layout specialists with their rights, and illustrators and designers with their rights. To go digital, “there are so many hurdles to clear,” he stated. “If just one rights holder says ‘no,’” he continued, “the whole thing collapses.”

The issue clearly has momentum. This came home to me on Nov. 11, when I attended the second gathering of members of the consortium. This was held in a big ballroom at the Grand Prince Hotel Akasaka. The room was crammed with around 250 people. There were just two keynote speakers. One was Murase-san, talking about copyright issues, but the main speech was made by a government official, Yasu Taniwaki of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications. His theme was a familiar one: “The magazine-publishing industry of Japan has to go digital or die.”

Right now, and for the past year, I have been the only foreign correspondent following this story. I urge others to join in. What we are seeing here is nothing less than the wholesale reorganization of probably the largest magazine community in the world. At a time when Japan, as a whole, is moribund and seemingly going nowhere – check the Tokyo Stock Exchange; foreign investors have totally lost confidence in Japan at this point – I applaud the efforts of Yuko Tanaka and Tetsu Okubo in laying down the foundation for Japan’s magazine industry in the digital age. ❶