More Tempura, Please

Japanese tourism is having what we might call a 'moment'. Nearly one million Australians visited the country last year, Instagram at the ready, with December 2024 being a record month for international travellers. But if you think you go to Japan a lot, spare a thought for the Editor-in-Chief of Tempura Magazine, Emil Pacha Valencia, who splits his time between home (Paris) and his other home (Tokyo). Rough commute distance: 13,700km.

"I'm just back in Paris. I was in Tokyo for a month and a half, and I'll be flying back there in January," he says. "I spend about four or five months of every year in Japan."

Tempura is a quarterly, bilingual publication that began in 2019 (it used to be French only, but Emil's been publishing in French and English since edition 21). The mag's remit is pretty broad: Japanese culture, subcultures, life and love, death and family, folk crafts and interior design. Anything that catches Emil's eye, really. The latest issue, #22, is dedicated entirely to Japanese life in the 1990s – asset-bubbles-and-widespread-economic-collapse included.

So how did a French guy born in Cuba, and based in Paris, come to run one of the world's most successful magazines about life in Japan? And why isn't this as problematic and vaguely colonial as it sounds? Well, it's a long story…

Maybe we could start with the obvious question. Why make a French magazine all about Japan?

We started the magazine, basically, because at the time (and I mean, even today) all the stuff you can find about Japan, it's all about pop culture. Manga, anime – you can find lots of content about that. Even traditional culture, like what you see in museums, art books and libraries, but that bit in the middle, this narrow road where you can talk about social issues and contemporary life in Japan, there was nothing.

And that was quite new. We felt that there was a readership for that. Because for my generation in France – I was born in the late 80s, and I grew up in the 90s – Japanese pop culture was everywhere. That generation is now in their late 30s, early 40s, and our intuition was that they wanted something different. So we said, 'Why don't we give them a paper magazine with content they can't find anywhere else.'

Do you have a personal connection to Japan?

Yeah, actually. I was born in Cuba. My mother is Cuban, and my father was also born there. And growing up, our next door neighbours were this Japanese family. They were a fishermen family, and they were there to teach Japanese fishing techniques to Cuban fishermen, after the revolution. We became very close, because there was no fence between our houses. My cousin actually married the daughter of that family. And he was the one that took me to Japan, for the first time, when I was 15. This was in 2003, so at the time there was almost no tourism in Japan. I arrived there and was like, "Whoa, what is this place?"

Was the country what you expected?

Not at all! That's the issue with pop culture and manga and anime. It kind of gives you this deformed image of Japan, which has some truth in it, but it's not the whole truth. So when I arrived there, I had a lot of clichés in my head. Luckily, I had the opportunity to stay with one of my cousin's friends, this Japanese guy, and he had a son my age, so I got to dive deep into the daily life of Japan.

Is it hard to avoid those clichés in the magazine?

Yeah, it's very hard. And that I think that was one of the main problems we tried to deal with, from the beginning: we didn't want to essentialise Japanese culture, or what Japan should be. Especially from a Western point of view.

It's not perfect, what we do, but we try as much as possible to give a voice to Japanese people. We don't have a lot of analysis from Western journalists. We try to have more reports, profiles and interviews with Japanese people, with Japanese writers, movie makers, musicians and researchers. And our team is basically based there. Or they're Japanese writers living in France. We use Japanese photographers, Japanese illustrators. We try to work with local teams as much as possible.

Does that influence the kind of stories you tell?

Yeah, we try not to jump into what people would want to read about Japan. Instead, we start with: 'What would people not expect to read about Japan? What's something new?' So instead of doing, I don't know, a piece on Akihabara, the electronic neighbourhood in Tokyo, or about the history of samurai, we'll write a report on shamanism in Japan. Like blind shamans from the north of Japan. And we send a journalist there to meet with them and to really dive into their culture.

“We try not to jump into what people would want to read about Japan. Instead, we start with: ‘what would people not expect to read about Japan?”

We don't pretend to give answers about what Japan is, or what Japanese culture means. We just want to raise questions about what's happening there today.

What's the response been like, especially from Japanese people?

France has a long cultural link with Japan. So Japanese people are quite interested in France, and French people are very interested in Japan. So the response has been good! And what I've noticed through the years is that, a lot of the topics we talk about, sometimes they're things you can't even talk about openly in Japan.

There were a lot of great social magazines in Japan in the 80s and 90s, but they've kind of vanished now. So it's hard for Japanese people to get access to the kind of stories we write. Like we recently did a feature on single mothers in Japan, and another on abortion rights, and foreign immigrant workers. Topics that aren't really discussed there.

So the response we get from Japanese people is often, "Oh, I wish I could read about that!" It's one of the reasons we now do bilingual editions, in French and English. We'd love to do Japanese too, but unfortunately it's a bit complicated with the translations and the layouts and everything. Hopefully one day!

Japanese mags traditionally have a very different aesthetic? Did you put a lot of thought into the art style?

Definitely. Our art director and co-founder, Clémence Fabre, when we created Tempura she did this massive deep dive into the golden age of Japanese magazines, the 80s and 90s. She basically went to Jinbōchō¹ in Tokyo to dig into old magazines for days and days. But the goal was never to design something that 'looked Japanese.' We didn't want to lean on visual clichés for Western audiences – like kanji or traditional patterns – or to essentialise anything, even visually.

At the same time, we didn't want Tempura to be, like, a design magazine, or an art magazine – something with experimental layouts but was very hard to read. Reading a magazine has to be comfortable. If the type is too small, or you can't easily find the next paragraph, that's no good. It has to flow. Especially when you're combining long-form journalism with design-driven content.

What's the big difference between Japanese and French design?

There are some bridges between French and Japanese design, for sure. A lot of great French designers and architects have been to Japan at some point in their life, to work there. Like Charlotte Perriand in the 1940s. But I'd say the big difference is one of craftsmanship. Japan has this amazing legacy of craft, especially with the Mingei movement, where skills are passed through generations. In France, and in most western countries, design is always tied to the designer. To a name. But when French designers got to Japan, they found it was much more anonymous. And craftsmen there, who don't even think of themselves as 'designers', they actually have an incredible sense of design and functionality. In Japan, it's all about: what is the function of a chair, the purpose of a table, a sofa, a cup. Design craft is more about how something works, rather than who made it.

And you guys recently launched an actual book? What made you do that?

Yeah, it's called Japan Underground², and it's a collection of our best stories from the last six years, all refreshed and redesigned with new layouts. Kind of a collector's piece.

I guess you could say it mostly focuses on subcultures, which is one of the big angles of Tempura. Because we believe subcultures don't need to be sub. There shouldn't be this hierarchy between high and low culture, you know? And we wanted to celebrate that through a book. Something that honoured all the people we've collaborated with over the last six years – the journalists and writers, the photographers, the ordinary people we interview. It's a way to share everything great about Tempura, just in a longer format.

“We believe subcultures don’t need to be sub. There shouldn’t be this hierarchy between high and low culture, you know? And we wanted to celebrate that through a book.”

What's the biggest lesson you've learned about Japan over the last six years?

Mostly it's to never think that you know Japan. As Westerners, we tend to essentialise Asian countries, to make them very exotic. By saying, 'they are this' or 'they are that', what we're really saying is, 'they are different. We are better'. So I don't pretend to know a lot about Japan. I just know I need to keep talking about it, keep writing about it, learning as much as I can. I think it's good not to know anything, and to keep questioning yourself and your preconceptions. And that's what we want to keep doing with Tempura: raising questions, rather than offering answers.

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¹ If second-hand books and magazines are your thing, Jinbōchō Book Town in Kanda-Jinbōchō, Tokyo, has got you covered. It’s been the city’s unofficial book worm mecca since the late 1800s.

² Now available in specialty bookstores. We should warn you though, c’est en français.

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