One thing I've always been feeling since the launch of REALTOKYO (RT) in 1999 is the absence of both rivals and fellow combatants. You can read about my motivation to launch RT in vol. 1 of the "Out of Tokyo" series, but put in a nutshell, it’s all summed up in the following line: "We live in an age where the thresholds between countries have been lowered, where socializing across national borders is simple, where distance is spanned and we have the same topics of conversation in common. Not talk about stock prices or real estate — an exchange of information centering on topics in cinema, music, and the fine and performing arts." The more such platforms exist, the better it is of course, but unfortunately not much is happening. I was delighted to see the bilingual web magazine Tokyo Art Beat launch in October 2004, but as you will get from the name, this one focuses primarily on art.

 

Pleasant news was also the start of Cinra Magazine, a free culture CD magazine. I got to know the Cinra people and their work when they interviewed me at the time when we put out the first volume of ART iT magazine in 2004. Also the medium of a CD-ROM magazine seemed not exactly cutting-edge to me, to see with how much enthusiasm these young folks were doing theit thing was reassuring to me. Three month after the interview I received the next issue of Cinra, but to be honest, I was too lazy to mount the CD and put it in the shelf without seeing what was inside. It was only another couple of months later that I realized that the magazine was linked to a website that carries exactly the same contents. In addition, there are several offline event such as live concerts and a salon kind of event to meet and chat. The 12th issue of Cinra was just published this month, and I took the opportunity to meet publisher Sugiura Taichi, who interviewed me three years ago.

 

"As a student of cross-cultural studies at University of Tsukuba, I found campus much less exciting than I had expected, so during the weeks I was always looking forward to spending the weekend in Tokyo. I was born in Tokyo, so I always knew and have been frustrated about the lack of information in this city. Looking at the art and music some of the smarter fellows around were doing, I realized that this was not my cup of tea because I am not a creator, and I decided to find myself some production-related work instead. The next idea was to establish some kind of community space for creators. That was the time when things like mixi didn't yet exist, and Kanshin Kukan was about all that was available."

 

"The first thing I made was cinra.net, which opened in February 2003. But my partner at the time pointed out that, "people can't go to a website shen they don't know the URL, so a tangible medium would be helpful to spread the word about Cinra", so I came up with the idea to produce a CD. For the first issue we burned 500 CD-R’s, one by one on our computers at home (laugh). Now we're making 10,000 copies per issue, which we distribute to places like ABC, HMV, live music venues , museums and galleries. At Tower Records, 200-300 copies go withing a day or two. We consider the CD as a promotion tool that inspires those who don't know Cinra yet to try and access the website via the CD."

 

"At present, there are three core members, surrounded by a total of about 30 volunteering editors and writers. About half of them are students, the other half are working for publishing companies. The magazine is based on the principle of people publishing their own ideas and thoughts in their own words. We established Cinra, Inc. in 2006 as a foundation that we stabilize financially by doing such things as design work for business websites for example. There are cases in which we work with creators with whom wwe linked up through cinra, and our person in charge of music is trying to make use of his connections to the likes of Yamaha and Toshiba EMI to organize events and start up a net label. Anyway, if we have to rely on our other jobs in order to keep the website running, it won't be fun, so the ideal would be to expand the CD mag. My plan is to put more emphasis on the printed part, and make the thing grow within a year into a proper magazine as a stage for young artists to present themselves."

 

Divided into the categories "Stage", "Art", "Music", "Movie" and "Book", the latest issue’s table of contents reads like this: "Chronicle of small-sized theatres in the 21st century", "Interview with Tanaami Keiichi", "Interview with Sokabe Keiichi", "Visual documentary special", etc.

 

Indeed a rich palette of topics, plus music and visuals that are also on the CD. In the reading corner I found the "prison library special" in the "Book" corner particularly exciting. They "asked a prison’s head officer about what the prisonerss are reading", and "photographed a jailhouse library", and those articles are truly imaginative and rewarding to read. Although not entirely perfectly written, in times when other media narrow down their audiences by specializing on certain topics, the ambition to cover territory as broad as this certainly deserves respect. Even though both format and aims are different, there is something about Cinra that is not unlike Generation Times, which calls itself a "journalistic tabloid paper".

 

Regrettable is only the fact that all text in Cinra is Japanese only. Sugiura explains, "What I want to create is a medium that gives people visiting Japan from abroad all the latest information on cultural topics." But, even if publishing everything in multiple languages is nearly impossible, making the mag bilingual would be the first and essential thing to do. It goes without saying that this involves costs, so I hope Sugiura and his team manage to increase the number of readers AND sponsors. Well, not that we at RT are in a situation that allows us to sit back and watch others shoot past us…

Ozaki Tetsuya / Editor in chief / REALTOKYO