Right before Golden Week, I got a nice visit by Doi Kazuhiro (28) from Tokushima. He has been appearing in various media recently so you his name might ring a bell. Doi quit his job after coming across the book "One Hundred Years of Idiocy" three years ago, and embarked on a trip around libraries throughout Japan. On his own website, Doi explains his project as follows: "Have you ever been shocked after learning the truth about a certain thing? When I stumbled upon the book 'One Hundred Years of Idiocy' and learned about the facts it illustrates, I was so shocked that I could hardly eat for a while. I felt that I had to do something, introduce the book to as many people as possible. I got out my bicycle and embarked on a journey around libraries all around Japan in order to convince them to buy and stock the book."
As I wrote about One Hundred Years of Idiocy myself in Out of Tokyo 035 shortly after making it, it is basically a collection of one hundred photographs documenting the countless "idiocies" committed by mankind against the global environment and towards itself in the 20th century. Next to my own essay, the book contains pregnant comments by Zheng Yi (novelist), Freeman Dyson (astrophysicist), Ikezawa Naoki (novelist), Abbas Kiarostami (filmmaker), Claude Levi-Strauss (ethnologist/anthropologist). Even now, five years after it was published, the book is still selling well and stores keep stocking it.
Be that as it may, for me as an author and editor the existence of people like Doi-san is really (in fact almost "un-really") blissful. I couldn't bow deeply enough to a man who plays his role of an "evangelist" with such great enthusiam. Hi smeans of transportation is a bicycle, and his aim is to visit 3,000 libraries. He showed me his list of tagerted libraries, complete with detailed comments about the reactions of those he already visited — almost 1,200, mainly in eastern Japan.
Besides "One Hundred Years of Idiocy", Doi-san has selected a number of publications that are "accessible even for those who are less interested in environmental issues" (from the aforementioned website) to "stock" in his "library on wheels". That’s right, Doi-san has in fact added the function of a mobile library to the bike that takes him around Japan, and in each town and village he visits, people can choose titles from his waterwheel-shaped "bookshelf" to borrow for free. They don't even have to return them. Instead, after finishing the respective book, every reader is supposed to add one leaf to the image of a tree Doi-san himself has drawn onto the last page, and give the book to someone else. The more people are reading the books, the greener the trees on the last pages get.
As you can see in the photographs, this handmade "library " is highly appealing also visually. I think that’s a brilliant trick to attract people who see the object from afar and ask themselves what it could possibly be. While I was taking these photos, employees of nearby cafes and companies came flocking to see what’s going on, and most of them went away with a book from the library. I suppose the trees in each of the books must have two or three more leaves by now.
Doi-san payed the "bibliotheca" out of his own pocket. He keeps living expenses at a minimum, and if necessary, does some part-time job during stopovers. He mostly sleeps in parks and on river banks, in a small tent he is carrying with him. I offered him to start a campaign to boost his budget, but he refused flatly yet politely. I think I'll buy him a lunch next time we meet…
It was essayist Ishida Yusuke who introduced me to Doi Kazuhiro. There are several entries about Doi-san in Ishida’s blog (Japanese only), check it out if you're interested.
Ozaki Tetsuya / Editor in chief / REALTOKYO