Shueisha Halts Production Of Japanese Version of "Playboy"

[Mulboyne]

[American Oyaji]

don't read it, but they might have better sales if they had MORE japanese cover girls. Girls they might actually meet

[Mulboyne]

...they might have better sales if they had MORE japanese cover girls. Girls they might actually meet

You're projecting, AO.

The magazine didn't have a lot of cover girls in later years. There have been more covers like this:

[American Oyaji]

You're projecting, AO.

The magazine didn't have a lot of cover girls in later years. There have been more covers like this:

Not sure what you mean by projecting. But that cover looks more like Rolling Stone than Playboy. The girls is what sold the magazine. I don't think I've ever heard of a U.S. Playboy that didn't have a girl on the front. And if it didn't, it probably had The Playboy Bunny.

[Taro Toporific]

[Mulboyne]

The Sankei carries a list of all the magazines which have closed down this year, many of which have been noted on FG. The piece concludes that the worst is not yet over for Japan's magazine market.

[Behan]

Bankruptcy of a monopoly: Good riddance to Yohan foreign book distributor
debito.org August 1st, 2008
Yohan (Nihon Yousho Hanbai), the monopolist distributors of foreign-language books, just went bankrupt. To quote Nelson Muntz: "Haa haa". Yohan is essentially the Darth Vader of Japanese book distributors...
....book stores (check out Maruzen or Kinokuniya) selling imported English-language books (i.e. best sellers, novels, and classic literature) at exchange rates not seen in Japan for more than two decades (think between 150-200 yen to the dollar).....
...more...

Back in the 90s I used to wonder why book prices at Kinokuniya came out to zeros and then one time I looked over the counter and saw they were calculating the price by multiplying the dollar price by 200 yen. That was way over the exchange rate.

[Charles]

Back in the 90s I used to wonder why book prices at Kinokuniya came out to zeros and then one time I looked over the counter and saw they were calculating the price by multiplying the dollar price by 200 yen. That was way over the exchange rate.

They did that here in the US too. I used to buy 400Y magazines that cost $8. Hell of a racket, eh?

[omae mona]

They did that here in the US too. I used to buy 400Y magazines that cost $8. Hell of a racket, eh?

I wonder if anybody thought about sending them back to Japan and selling them for 1600Y...

[Behan]

They did that here in the US too. I used to buy 400Y magazines that cost $8. Hell of a racket, eh?

They are too greedy. There must already be a profit margin covered by the price printed on the book.

What they end up charging must be way beyond the books' cost to make and ship.

[Mulboyne]

"L Magazine", a well-known Kansai information journal, will suspend publication at the end of the year, finishing with the release of the February edition on the 25th December. The magazine has been running since 1977. At its peak, sales reached 150,000 copies but the numbers have been declining sharply owing to competition from the web and also free papers.

[Mulboyne]

Continuing the carnage in the magazine market, the Yomiuri Weekly has announced that it will cease publication with its December 1st issue. The magazine started in 1943 under the name Shukan Yomiuri, changing its name in 1952. This is one of the first major titles taken off the market by one of the big newspaper publishing companies.

[Charles]

I haven't checked commodity prices lately, but my understanding is that the crash of the print magazine and newspaper market was caused by Enron. They cornered the market in newsprint and started arbitraging, forcing anyone who wanted a stable supply of paper to deal with their phony market manipulations. I don't know if it's recovered since the Enron collapse, but these commodity manipulations tend to live on forever once a clever marketer discovers it could work. Paper is the highest cost item in the actual production of the physical magazine or newspaper.

[Mulboyne]

Asahi: Fabled men's magazine publishes final issue

Once considered the epitome of cool but long since lacking in luster, the Japanese edition of Playboy hit the stands for the last time in late November. Coinciding with a gradual decline in the public's interest in American culture, the demise of the monthly magazine also comes at a time in which the Internet has a stranglehold on the market for titillating images. First released on May 21, 1975, the Japanese edition of Playboy had been published by Shueisha Inc. The initial print run of 438,000 copies sold out in about three hours. An additional 22,000 copies were printed. "The level of nudity of the women models as well as their sheer physical mass was overwhelming," said Naomichi Hirotani, 66, who was involved in the start of the magazine. "The impact of the magazine was unlike anything ever published in Japan."

The Japanese edition tried not to rely only on images of naked women. The first issue included a translation of "The Fight," a report by Norman Mailer on the "Rumble in the Jungle" boxing match in Zaire between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in 1974 that originally appeared in the U.S. edition. The Japanese edition later included nonfiction travel pieces by noted Japanese writers as well as interviews with celebrities from around the world. "We were trying to become a pictorial version of the monthly Bungei Shunju magazine or at least to handle themes that appeared in the Asahi Journal weekly magazine," Hirotani recalled. Among the individuals consulted before the first issue were the late writer Makoto Oda and Tetsuya Chikushi, the late Asahi Shimbun reporter who would go on to serve as editor in chief of the Asahi Journal. Many features were well received, including an account by the writer Takeshi Kaiko about fishing in the Amazon. Another popular column by the critic Chin Naito reviewed mystery novels.

The success of the Japanese edition of Playboy led to other monthly pictorial magazines in the late 1980s, such as Days Japan, put out by Kodansha Ltd., and Marco Polo, published by Bungeishunju Ltd. The February 1981 issue sold about 700,000 copies. The issue carried an interview with John Lennon conducted shortly before he was murdered in December 1980. However, Playboy has fallen on harder times recently with circulation dropping to a mere 55,000. As in the United States, the more graphic descriptions of sex in other media have weakened the impact of the nude photos found in Playboy. Ironically, those photos limited the style and volume of advertising placed in the Japanese edition.

Yoshiaki Kiyota, head of Shuppan News Co., has followed publishing trends for a long time. "Magazines are living things," Kiyota said. "Playboy's days are over. The term 'Playboy' as well as the Playboy bunny logo that were once considered the epitome of cool have lost its freshness and has now come to be seen as a symbol of what is not cool." When the first issue appeared in 1975, travel abroad was just beginning to be possible for the average Japanese after more than a decade of strong economic growth. Many aspects of American culture, such as jazz, Major League baseball, surfing and jeans, were introduced to Japanese readers by Playboy and the men's magazine Popeye, which began at about the same time. "During the 1970s, Japanese society underwent a drastic change in order to match the consumer culture of the United States," said Eiko Ikui, a professor at Kyoritsu Women's University who is an expert on American culture. Such symbols of American consumerism as McDonald's and Seven-Eleven first appeared in Japan in 1971 and 1974, respectively. "For the youth of today born in the Heisei Era (1989-present), there is no awareness that these institutions are from the United States," Ikui said. "Over the course of 30 years, Japan has been thoroughly steeped in 'American-type things' and there is no longer a need to learn about these things through magazines."

Despite those changes, the Japanese edition of Playboy was never just a carbon copy of the U.S. edition. Although there are different editions of Playboy published in about two dozen nations, the Japanese edition is the only one in which women do not grace the cover. About 80 percent of the material in any issue was original to the Japanese edition. The editors in chief of the various foreign editions met once a year, and many reportedly remarked that they wanted to publish a "fashionable" edition like the Japanese version. Shortly before the start of the war in Iraq in 2003, the Japanese edition published an account from Iraq by writer Natsuki Ikezawa. Editors at the Japanese edition tried to persuade their counterparts at the U.S. edition to run a translation of the Ikezawa article, but they were rebuffed. In the final issue, Ikezawa writes of that experience: "While borrowing the framework, homegrown content was included in the magazine. The editing policy itself was to level strong Japanese criticism against the United States. It was completely different from the fawning efforts to move closer to the United States by the Japanese government and the business world."

The cover of the final issue features a white Playboy bunny logo against a black background, a layout that is similar to the inaugural issue. Iori Tanaka, the last editor in chief of the Japanese edition of Playboy, will move to another magazine. "I regret that Playboy will not be able to report on global trends in the future," Tanaka, 49, said.

[Mulboyne]

AP/Kyodo: Japan edition of Marie Claire magazine to be suspended

The Japanese edition of women's monthly Marie Claire will suspend publication after the September issue goes on sale on July 28, due in part to the economic doldrums, the publisher said Tuesday. Debuting in 1982, the Japanese-language edition of the magazine conceived in France and distributed worldwide in local editions had won reader support for featuring not only fashion but also novels and cinema. Chuokoronsha Inc., now Chuokoron-Shinsha Inc., published the Japanese version of Marie Claire first before Kadokawa Shoten Publishing Co. took over in 1999 followed by Hachette Fujingaho, a Tokyo-based affiliate of France's Lagardere Active, in 2003. Hachette Fujingaho said it has agreed with Marie Claire Album S.A., which controls the magazine's license, to terminate their contract amid a decline in advertising revenues.

[Mulboyne]

The Asahi reports that the Japanese edition of Forbes will also cease publication in September.

[Mulboyne]

Tokyo listings magazine "Pia", available since 1972, will close in July. The firm will focus on its ticket sales business (about 90% of current revenue). They may consider launching a new entertainment title later in the year.

[Mulboyne]

Tokyo listings magazine "Pia", available since 1972, will close in July. The firm will focus on its ticket sales business (about 90% of current revenue). They may consider launching a new entertainment title later in the year.

There's now an online gallery paying tribute to the cover designs of Masamichi Oikawa here.

Japan Times ran a profile of Oikawa a few years ago which you can read here.