A Novel Plot to Rescue Used Books

TADAMI, Japan — In a reinterpretation of recycling, a used-book store in remote northeastern Japan is giving away land on a forested mountainside in exchange for customers’ old books.

The idea has become an instant hit with the book-loving and increasingly environmentally conscious public, not least because most Japanese homes are far too cramped for hoarding books. Stratospheric real estate prices have killed off many of Tokyo’s used-book stores, and the survivors generally offer only recent bestsellers. Yet few Japanese can bear to sentence their dear old printed friends to the garbage dump or paper recycler.

About 10,000 people have mailed off 1 million used books to the Tamokaku bookstore in the three years since the land-for-books program began.

In return, the company has given away nearly 25 acres of forest, said Koichi Kitsu, Tamokaku’s 43-year-old founder.

“Japanese will throw out newspapers and magazines, even if the magazine moved them deeply, but they feel it’s a sin to throw out even an awful book,” Kitsu said. “I don’t think it’s a sin, and it’s certainly better to recycle books than throw them away or burn them. But it’s best to [keep them and] use them again.”

So every day at 10 a.m., a delivery truck arrives in the tiny town of Tadami in Fukushima prefecture bearing from eight to 15 boxes--an average of 1,000 books a day.

Tamokaku’s five wooden buildings are crammed to the rafters with every species of book, as well as CDs and videotapes. Its eight employees do not have the time to sort the new arrivals, and because the store does not have the space to handle the books, it is adding a sixth building for the overflow. Tamokaku receives e-mail from book lovers all over the country searching for out-of-print titles.

Tamokaku does not accept magazines, but its huge collection of manga, or comic books, attracts fans from all over Japan, who join assorted other book lovers, bargain hunters and used-book dealers, Kitsu said. The bookstore has sold about 300,000 volumes over the last three years and has an inventory of 600,000. About 100,000 books were destroyed in a fire last year.

Customers are given coupons worth 10% of the price of the old books they send in. The coupons can be redeemed for free books, rooms at local inns or land. Twenty to 30 hardcover books are usually enough to receive a coupon worth about $15, good for one tsubo of forest, or 35.5 square feet, the traditional unit for measuring land in Japan. When a customer collects about 300 tsubo, or a quarter of an acre, Tamokaku will do the paperwork at the local land office to transfer the title to the new owner.

But any Tamokaku customer who owns a mere tsubo is welcome to enjoy all of the company’s roughly 310 acres of land--which includes the property owned by other customers. There, they can pick mushrooms, berries or mountain vegetables, hike, camp, fish, cross-country ski or even snowmobile.

Tamokaku’s concept differs from other Japanese nature trusts, which “buy up land and don’t allow anyone in and don’t allow anyone to touch a blade of grass,” Kitsu said.

The company’s lands are not virgin forest but mountains that have been logged for centuries, most recently about 25 years ago. Many hardwood species have returned, including cherry and other valuable trees. The undergrowth must be cut each year to keep the land from turning into jungle.

Still, the program keeps the forest out of the hands of developers while allowing city folk a cheap taste of green.

Tamokaku is hardly a profit center, but it has been plowing its sporadic earnings into buying more land, Kitsu said.

Kitsu, who began his career by turning his ancestral home in Tadami into a country inn, continues to run three other businesses: a magazine about rural life; a lumber cooperative that makes parts for major furniture manufacturers; and a company that buys old farmhouses--which are being demolished across Japan--renovates them with modern conveniences and turns them into vacation homes.

The author of eight books of essays on Japanese rural issues, Kitsu sees his future as a green entrepreneur.

In the days before the postwar economic boom, Japanese used to redye kimonos, reuse paper and re-cover dirty and old sliding doors with decorated paper. These vanished customs are being remembered fondly in this era of scant economic growth and even scantier space in landfills.

“Now I think Japan is returning to these old traditions,” Kitsu said.