CURRENT TOPICS
2003 marks the 71st year since our founding and I feel that we are at a new starting point for the future. The so-called “global business wave” has dramatically affected and changed the way we do business. Speaking frankly, we Japanese, standing in our island country, often forget that we are closely interconnected with the international dynamism. Many Japanese say that it is still possible to survive and stay alive and continue our high standard of living even if our national income, which is the 2nd largest in the world, were to be reduced. This way of thinking had not been problematical until the opening up of the east and the west but now many other Asian nations, which have only one fifth of the wages of Japan, are now manufacturing highly technological materials and accessing the world through their own computers and networks.
This year, as everybody knows, the Iraq crisis and the SARS crisis have adversely affected our business affairs. The Beijing book fair has been postponed until autumn and even the Tokyo International Book Fair in April, while experiencing a 5% increase in attendance, actually had a decrease of exhibitors from overseas and many booths remained empty. The Tokyo Book Fair has also become known as the biggest bargain book fair since many foreign language items, both those imported and those published locally, are sold only once a year at a greatly reduced price. Therefore many people wait for this one chance and visit the fair to make their purchases. I think that the English language reading public has actually grown year by year since many Japanese have experienced not only living in foreign countries but also learning and studying at overseas universities etc.. However despite this trend, the Japanese language is still the preferred language for academic books and for popular books. Now many big conglomerates based in the Asia Pacific region have changed their marketing strategies toward the Japan market. They wish to establish their own Japanese office and to market their own titles directly to the end user. I understand that this will eventually influence the traditional Japanese book distribution system. Therefore it is imperative that we distributors learn to cooperate and to work with the overseas companies in the Japanese market. I believe that an interesting time has come and Yushodo is always open to and always welcomes opportunities with publishers and we look forward to working together toward the mutual benefit of all concerned.
We have invited Professor John C. Peck, Connell Teaching Professor of Law at the University of Kansas School of Law, and Mr. Yukio Yanagida, a prominent international lawyer and active advocate of the current legal education reform in Japan, as lecturers at a special seminar that Yushodo is organizing. The seminar is entitled "The New Frontier: The Opening of Law Schools in Japan" and will be held on July 18th with the cooperation of LexisNexis Japan. Yushodo Fantas, our affiliate who handles the law titles, is managing the seminar. Yushodo Group now has the largest market share for practical legal materials in English, including monographs and loose-leaf titles. Our market includes Japanese university libraries, scholars and law firms. If you wish to have representation of your legal materials in the Japan market using our unique door to door approach, please contact our legal division.
Other areas where we have increased our marketing activities are the UMI Dissertation Services provided by ProQuest Information and Learning, and our own Japan Doctoral Dissertation Registration System (JDR). We are now constructing a system which will allow students and scholars to search and order UMI and JDR dissertations on the Web, as well as registering their own dissertations into our system. It is our responsibility to organize and establish this system in Japan especially for younger Japanese scholars.
On a different note, I am pleased to tell you that The Peterborough Bestiary, a facsimile edition of a beautiful medieval manuscript held in the Parker Library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, will be ready for delivery soon. The facsimile is co-published by Yushodo and Faksimile Verlag Luzern with the cooperation of the Parker Library, and will be our second such international publishing venture, continued from the Huntington Library Ellesmere Chaucer Project. We expect to continue investing in such types of projects as these in the future.
Once every five years, our employees get together to have a “strategy meeting.” This year we had one full day of strategy sessions that included both veteran employees and the younger generation employees. After this we announced that “we wish to keep our profile as a reasonably sized company and to use our best strategy in order to approach our customers.” It is now up to us to keep our network and to decide which company we will cooperate with in the future.
In closing, I do hope that we will continue to enjoy close cooperation with all our colleagues from the start of our 70th anniversary.
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