The cult-like cool of Japanese magazines

I keep every magazine I've ever been published in. It's my inner hoarder trying to get out.

The only problem is that I'm running out of storage, and my office-slash-bedroom, which I'm currently sharing with my 10-month-old son, is now starting to resemble some kind of creepy magazine shrine. There are dog-eared copies of Rolling Stone and frankie and the (now-defunct) Smith Journal littered everywhere, along with other titles. Magazine racks are overloaded and visibly buckling under the strain. A four-inch stack keeps my computer monitor at an ergonomic eye level.

But this is really just a long-winded way of establishing my print credentials right up-front. I have a thing for magazines. I've been reading them and writing for them and collecting them for nearly 20 years.

I think the enduring appeal of the magazine has something to do with the very specific feeling you get on a warm Sunday morning, when you sit down at the breakfast table, coffee in hand, faced with a whole day of blissful nothingness, and open a fresh newspaper. I don't know what you call that feeling, but someone needs to bottle it. Nothing online comes close. And just because the industry has struggled to monetise magazines over the last 20 years doesn't mean people have stopped loving them, or even reading them. Kind of the opposite. We still read magazines for the same reason the Metaverse hasn't taken off: some things you just gotta touch.

But for all my years of fandom, I have an embarrassing cultural blind spot: Japanese magazines. It's a field of zine-dom that I've never really explored. Partly because I don't speak Japanese, and partly because magazines are (by nature) rather expensive. Both to buy and to make. And so shelling out 15-or-so bucks on something I can't even read seems frivolous and hard to justify, even for a chronic mag hoarder like me.

But it turns out Japanese magazines are having what you might call a moment. And not just in Japan. This subculture's cool factor is so objective and universal that it seems to transcend language barriers. Speciality mag shops are stocking Japanese titles in Melbourne, Paris, New York, LA and London. And people are actually buying them. People who don't speak a lick of Japanese and think kanji is a type of pear.

"Interest in these Japanese titles is rising, let me tell you," says Fernando Pacheco, Senior Correspondent for Monocle and host of their weekly magazine podcast, The Stack. "Now in London, where I'm based, in all the cool magazine shops you see those titles on the shelves. People are obsessed with them."

Fernando consumes more magazines, and a greater variety of magazines, than perhaps anyone else on the planet. It's literally his job. So I ask him what's so special about Japanese titles. Why would people buy these things if they can't even read them?

"The language thing isn't really a barrier," he says. "I don't speak Japanese, so when I read a Japanese magazine I just use Google Translate. But really they have such a strong visual component that it doesn't even matter.

"I think Japanese magazines bring something that western mags have forgotten about. Japanese titles, especially the fashion ones, work a bit like a catalogue. On one page you might see 20 tee-shirts, for example, but laid out in a very exciting way. Everything is very in-depth, very specific. It's capitalistic, maybe, but beautifully done."

When you pick up your first Japanese magazine, this is the thing you notice straight away (apart from the fact that it opens leftwise, with the spine running down the righthand side). The average page layout is crammed with so much detail – so many products and images and scribbly illustrations and reviews and tips and shopping ideas – that your brain doesn't know where to start.

Most western magazines pride themselves on carefully curated aspirational minimalism – the whole less-is-more-and-you-can't-afford-it-anyway vibe. They almost make you feel guilty for handling them, lest you smudge the pages. But Japanese titles seems to say, "If less is more, just imagine how much more more will be." If nothing else, they're experiments in maximalism. "Kind of like a catalogue, but sexier," Fernando says.

Chris Schalkx from the Financial Times puts it another way, "Like analogue pin boards created by someone with enviably good taste."

And this, I think, is the secret ingredient.

Japanese magazines feel curated in the best possible way: the content isn’t selected to please advertisers, at least not overtly, and it certainly doesn’t follow the crowd. It kind of feels like someone very cool and interesting has made a scrapbook of all their favourite cool and interesting stuff, then lent you a copy.

I'm flicking through arguably Japan's most famous publishing export, Popeye, the self-styled "magazine for city boys", which has been going strong since 1976 and covers a broad mix of style, fashion and general urban coolness. This issue (#929) is all about thrift shops and second-hand vintage 'come ups' (I think I'm using that term correctly). And the layouts, at least to my brain, which has been conditioned on traditional grid-based spreads, seem almost manic. Total sensory overload.

Snapshots of people at markets are scattered haphazardly over the page. A small note tells you what each person is wearing. Contributors (every one with their own hand-drawn illustrated avatar) give recommendations for stamps, broaches, distressed denim, figurines, watches, 80s-style bum bags, soft toys and fishing reels. Page after page after page. There's an entire spread on American vintage lamps. Four pages in the centrefold are canary yellow, titled 'Yellow Pages of Secondhand', and list the major flea markets and vintage stores in Tokyo (neatly organised by product category).

The general threshold for whether something gets published or not seems to be 'interestingness'. There's even a recipe section at the back ("A cooking guide for city boys") with ingredients and step-by-step instructions for making Japanese curry. The whole thing feels completionist. Like between these two covers is the only Tokyo-based vintage shopping guide any human could ever possibly need.

You can trace the roots of this freewheeling aesthetic back to a New York bookstore in 1969, when Japanese editor Jirō Ishikawa and illustrator Yasuhiko Kobayashi stumbled on copies of Stewart Brand's famous 1960s counterculture rag, Whole Earth Catalogue.

In 1975, Ishikawa and Kobayashi channelled this encyclopaedic visual style into Made in USA, a "scrapbook of America", which became a runaway success back in Japan, introducing a new generation to American-style workwear. The next year, in 1976, the duo teamed up with editor Yoshihisa Kinameri to launch Popeye. And Japanese publishing never looked back.

"Japanese magazines are incredibly detailed and specific," Fernando says. "One I love is called Transit magazine. It's a quarterly travel title, and every issue they go to a different county or region.

"I first came upon them when they did an issue on Brazil, where I'm from, and oh my god it was like the best travel guide you can imagine. They went so in-depth. Like these are the Brazilian TV hosts you should know. Here are some smaller towns you might not have heard of, and how to get to them. Or a little illustrated guide to the animals of Brazil. The level of detail was incredible. I was like, 'How do they know all this!?'"

Along with popular titles like Popeye, Brutus¹ and Casa Brutus², Transit is a great example of Japanese hyper-specificity. It's a destination-based travel magazine, which is nothing unusual, but it tends to dive much deeper than your average Top-10-Things-To-Do wanderlust quarterly. It also features some interesting and incredibly niche themed editions, including a recent one on Breads of the World. That's an entire print magazine devoted to bread and bread-related products.

"They even had one on zoos," Fernando says. "And it was so detailed. Like this is the panda enclosure of a small zoo in Belgium kind of detailed. Really specific. Not everyone agrees with zoos, but it's an interesting idea nevertheless, and something most western magazines wouldn't even think of."

Journalist Michael Charboneau has noted this peculiar phenomenon in Huckberry.

"Japanese men's titles focus on hyper-specific style tribes," he writes, "high-end suits and business attire, for example, or vintage Americana like denim jackets and boots." And it's true. While western magazines have sectors or verticals – design, food, travel, what-have-you – they're mostly made to appeal to as many people within that vertical as possible. Because money, right.

Japanese magazines, on the other hand, aren't afraid to target super-niche subcultures. Examples include Hail Mary (vintage stuff), Grind (avant-garde streetwear) and Men's FUDGE (fashion for hip 20-somethings). A new title, Cult*, launched in 2024 with a first issue dedicated to fighting 'aloneness' – a chronic social problem in Japan. It features everything from a photo essay on Japanese-Black women, to an underground dive into Department H, Tokyo's longest-running fetish night. Compared to your average western publication, the whole scene feels experimental and kind of refreshing. Less mag and more zine.

"I think there's this ingrained love of print in Japan," Fernando says. "Like almost any store you go into, they'll have a little print catalogue with things you can buy, and it's all editorialised.

"There's a neighbourhood in Tokyo called Jinbocho, where they sell all kinds of vintage books, and there are specific shops just for vintage magazines. It's a dream. When I was there recently, I even discovered a dedicated fishing bookstore. Like all these Japanese magazines focussed entirely on fishing. It's brilliant."

There's a Japanese word, ikigai. Loose translation: 'passion that gives value and joy to life'. And that's the fundamental thing that leaps off the page of Japanese publications: passion. While a western travel magazine, for example, might focus on armchair adventure and leave specific recommendations to guidebooks, Japanese travel mags are literally designed to be carried with you and referenced and used as cool idea generation machines. It's kind of the difference between a sculpture and a tool. Both can be beautiful, but one is very clearly meant to be used.

Japanese magazines somehow manage to be prescriptive but not superior.

They tell you what to buy, what to wear, how to decorate your apartment, but they do it from a place of love and passion and encyclopaedic, nerd-like knowledge in the subject matter. Which is the inherent joy of all good magazines: they’re made by people who like something and want others to like it to.

"It's funny," Fernando says, "I think people, at least here in the UK, they see change and they move too fast. Everything is online? Let's close book shops. Streaming exists? Let's stop making CDs.

"But they forget there are huge groups of people out there who still value practical objects. They still want that physicality. People are really coming back to beautiful things."

Kyoto and Kanazawa are two of Japan's most photogenic cities. They're also the two cities that Never Too Small's Nam Tran often splits his time between when he's in Japan. As a parent of a preschooler, wandering the streets of pretty cities taking pictures is more of a rarity than a regular pastime, but once in a while, slices of time open up between work and life. What follows is the product of some of those slices: Nam making the most of some quality time with his Nikon 35Ti loaded up with some Portra 400 and just following his nose around two very photogenic cities.

¹ A sister publication to Popeye, which began in 1980. Brutus covers the kind of fashion that makes you seriously question the contents of your wardrobe.

² Think Brutus for interior design nerds.