The Japanese may love a hardworking and unassuming company man who out of nowhere wins the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, but they are still wary of the true entrepreneur who is willing to take risks and shake up long-established ways of doing things.
Thus, Koichi Tanaka is idolized by the media while Book Off founder Takashi Sakamoto, far from being admired for discovering an untapped market for used copies of relatively new books and creating jobs for 10,000 people, is vilified for supposedly causing the six-year slump in sales of new books and magazines.
In long interviews with Kazuna Matsumoto and journalist Masayoshi Murano in "Book Off no Shinjitsu (The Truth about Book Off)," Nikkei BP, Sakamoto explains how he came to found Book Off and gives some of his thoughts on the state of the book business in Japan today.