The Japanese bookstore world used to be one of "If you put it out, it will sell." But that comfortable age is over. Seven straight years of declining book sales have killed off some 1,500 bookstores.
Now, five years after the battle between independents and superstore chains was taken up in the Hollywood movie "You've Got Mail," mega-stores have popped up in Japan, spurred on by lower post-bubble rents and the threat posed by online booksellers.
Just this month, Maruzen opened Japan's third-largest bookstore in the Marunouchi section of Tokyo, with a stock of 1.2 million books (200,000 of them foreign), while Junkudo -- which operates Japan's largest bookstore in Ikebukuro -- is opening up a new store next month directly opposite the Kinokuniya's older store in Shinjuku.