Interviewing at Isseido Bookstore in a School Uniform: An Antiquarian Bookseller’s 52 Years in Jimbocho | Jimbocho and Me #1

#1　Joining Isseido Bookstore (June 2025 issue) (this article)
#2　Things That Change (July 2025 issue)　PDF of the issue
#3　Things That Change (continued) (August 2025 issue)　PDF of the issue
#4　Kobunkan Shoten (September 2025 issue)　PDF of the issue
#5　Matsumura Shoten (October 2025 issue)　PDF of the issue
#6　Kinzushi (November 2025 issue)　PDF of the issue
#7　Tokumanden (December 2025 issue)　PDF of the issue
#8　Drinks with the Shop Clerks (1) (January 2026 issue)　PDF of the issue
#9　Drinks with the Shop Clerks (2) (February 2026 issue)　PDF of the issue
#10　Drinks with the People from the Shop (March 2026 issue)　PDF of the issue
#11　The Oden Shop “A-One” (1) (April 2026 issue)　PDF of the issue
#12　The Oden Shop “A-One” (2) (May 2026 issue)
#13　The Oden Shop “A-One” (3) (June 2026 issue)
#14　The Post Office Bombing (July 2026 issue)　PDF of the issue
#15　Selling Beyond the Shop Floor (1) (August 2026 issue)
#16　Selling Beyond the Shop Floor (2) (September 2026 issue)
#17　The Fire During the Demolition of Sanseido Bookstore (October 2026 issue)

Setting of this installment
When | March 1973
Where | Isseido Bookstore (1-7 Kanda-Jimbocho, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo), still in business at the same address
The key book | Waga Machi no Ayumi (The Story of Our Town), the 30th-anniversary commemorative book of the Jimbocho 1-chome Neighborhood Association, 1979

Jimbocho and Me (#1): Joining Isseido Bookstore

Ryosuke Sakota (Keyaki Shoten)

My ties to Jimbocho began when I joined Isseido Bookstore. I worked there for thirteen years and nine months from March 1973 and went independent in 1987, so Keyaki Shoten, too, is now 38 years old. All told, I have been watching Jimbocho for about 52 years, and the neighborhood really has changed.

When I arrived, stretches of streetcar rail were still left on part of Yasukuni-dori Avenue, and on rainy days car tires would slip on them. There was a police box standing at the Jimbocho intersection. Above all, there were hardly any office buildings along Yasukuni-dori Avenue or Suzuran-dori Street. From where Isseido’s parking lot is today to around Okubo Shoten stood a row of eleven identical terraced shops, built after the Great Kanto Earthquake in the “signboard architecture” style of the reconstruction era. Today only Okubo Shoten still carries a trace of them.

An Essential Book for Understanding Jimbocho

So what stood in those places that have changed? Even though it was the main frontage along Yasukuni-dori, I can barely remember. How flimsy human memory is. Or perhaps mine is especially flimsy. Be that as it may, I set out to write a little about the Jimbocho of old, only to discover that my own memory was of no use at all, and I was at a loss. But then, whether by heaven’s help or as a blessing of the used-book trade, I found I had on hand a book called Waga Machi no Ayumi (The Story of Our Town).

It was published by the Jimbocho 1-chome Neighborhood Association on December 1, 1979, as a commemorative book for its 30th anniversary. It is B5 size, 152 pages in all, including six pages of color photographs. The text is richly illustrated with photos and, mixing in roundtable discussions, covers the neighborhood association, the merchants’ association, the festivals and more. It is a fascinating book, and one could call it essential for understanding Jimbocho. What is more, it comes with a separately printed “Map of the Jimbocho 1-chome Neighborhood Association,” a newspaper-sheet-sized map prepared as of December 1, 1979. It is a real treasure: it records, one by one, every shop, company and even private home in Jimbocho 1-chome, bounded by Yasukuni-dori Avenue to the north, the street with the traffic light in front of Kyoritsu Women’s University (since redeveloped, where two towers now stand) to the south, Hakusan-dori Avenue to the west and Chiyoda-dori Avenue to the east. Just looking over the many shops on the south side that vanished in the redevelopment brings back all sorts of memories, and I feel as if I have slipped back in time. But the same goes for the areas that were not redeveloped: so many shops are gone. In any case, thanks to this map, you can see at a glance how much has changed in the 46 years from 1979 to 2025.

Hired at Isseido Bookstore Through a Newspaper Ad

With that, I felt as if I had the strength of a hundred men. But where on earth to begin? Caught up in a vague uncertainty, I could not get my pen moving. So let me go back to square one and start from the time I joined Isseido.

I disliked school to begin with, and gave my teachers and parents a hard time by saying I didn’t even want to go to high school. I somehow managed to graduate, but I had no intention whatsoever of going to university, and after graduation I spent every morning poring over the want ads in the newspaper, looking for a job. I loved reading, so I had written out a résumé thinking I would try for a publisher, when, as it happened, Isseido Bookstore in Kanda was advertising for staff. Hermann Hesse, whom I had loved reading in high school, had—if I remembered right—taken his first job at a secondhand bookshop after leaving the gymnasium, so, following Hesse’s example, I went to Isseido for an interview. There were quite a few rounds of interviews, and no answer came for so long that I thought I had failed; just then I got word that I was hired. I learned later that this was the very first time Isseido had recruited through a newspaper ad, so the people doing the hiring weren’t used to it either. Fresh out of school, I didn’t own a suit, so I went to the interview in my stand-collar school uniform. I had been in the manga club, so I wrote my résumé with a dip pen, and it seems this came across as earnest and helped get me hired. Another thing I heard later: at the high school I graduated from, well over ninety percent of the boys went on to further study, and everyone knew where the rest were headed, whether to a job or the family business—except for one student nobody could account for. That was probably me. I never consulted the school or any teacher about further study or work; I simply picked up my diploma and left.

That year Isseido hired two men and two women. It may have been the first hiring job for Takehiko Sakai, the current president. I hear that these days more than a hundred people apply when they advertise, but in my year there were ten.

(Continued in the next issue)

Notes on Jimbocho in Those Days

Signboard architecture (kanban kenchiku)
Buildings erected in large numbers during the reconstruction after the Great Kanto Earthquake (1923): wooden shops whose street fronts were finished in a Western style with copper sheeting, mortar or tile. A few still survive along Yasukuni-dori Avenue in Jimbocho.

Streetcars (Toden)
Tokyo’s metropolitan streetcars once ran along Yasukuni-dori Avenue too. Most Toden lines were abolished between the mid-1960s and early 1970s, and by the time the author joined Isseido, only parts of the rails remained.

“Poli-box”
One of the old names for a koban, or police box. In those days a small police box stood at the Jimbocho intersection.

Waga Machi no Ayumi (The Story of Our Town)
Published in December 1979 by the Jimbocho 1-chome Neighborhood Association to commemorate its 30th anniversary. B5 format, 152 pages, with a separately printed “Map of the Jimbocho 1-chome Neighborhood Association” (per the article).

“Jimbocho and Me”: All Installments

#1　Joining Isseido Bookstore (this article)
#2　Things That Change
#3　Things That Change (continued)
#4　Kobunkan Shoten
#5　Matsumura Shoten
#6　Kinzushi
#7　Tokumanden
……
#12　The Oden Shop “A-One” (2)
#13　The Oden Shop “A-One” (3)
*More installments will be published in turn.

Ryosuke Sakota
Owner of Keyaki Shoten. After finishing high school, he joined Isseido Bookstore, a long-established antiquarian bookstore in Jimbocho, in 1973. After thirteen years and nine months there, he founded Keyaki Shoten in 1987. He is currently writing the series “Jimbocho and Me” for Hon no Machi.

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This article is the full text of installment 1 of “Jimbocho and Me” (text by Ryosuke Sakota), published in the June 2025 issue (Vol. 2) of Hon no Machi, the community salon magazine of Kanda, Ochanomizu and Jimbocho.

▶Read the June 2025 issue of Hon no Machi (PDF, in Japanese)

Founded in 1980, Hon no Machi brings you the latest from Book Town every month, together with Jimbocho’s bookstores, publishers, cafés and galleries.

▶Back issues of our series are being published on our note page (in Japanese)

日本語で読む — Read this article in Japanese