Tokyojin

Tokyojin[1] (東京人, Tōkyōjin) is a Japanese-language monthly magazine about the history and culture of Tokyo, and culture and leisure in the city. The title is a little-used term, almost a neologism, for somebody from, in or of Tokyo.[2]

History and profile

The first issue of Tokyojin was published in January 1986. Until the June 2001 issue it was published by the Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture (東京都歴史文化財団, Tōkyō-to Rekishi Bunka Zaidan).[3] The non-profit, non-commercial backing meant that the magazine stayed independent of the preoccupation with shopping and other consumption shared by the huge majority of Japanese magazines, and Tokyojin could concentrate on substantive issues of urban design and so forth.

From July 2001 the magazine was published by Toshi-Shuppan (都市出版), a commercial publisher; it has increasingly moved in the direction of a guide to culture, leisure and eating out in Tokyo for the middle-aged and retired, although it still has plenty of material of substance, and also of interest to other demographics.

In early 2007, its advisory editors were Saburō Kawamoto, Hidenobu Jinnai, and Mayumi Mori. The March 2007 issue, as an example, is a special issue titled "Edo Yoshiwara", about the Yoshiwara entertainment area of Edo: of the total of 162 pages (rather few of which are devoted to advertising, either overt or, as is common in Japanese magazines, covert), seventy-six pages are devoted to Yoshiwara. The contributors include Shōichi Ozawa and Makoto Takeuchi; features include a six-page interview with a very active and alert eighty-eight-year old geisha.

Notes
  1. "Tokyojin" is the roman-letter title as it appears on the spine; "Tokyo jin" the one that seems to appear (it is somewhat ambiguous) on the front cover.
  2. Tōkyōjin is constructed by analogy with the terms for "Spaniard" (スペイン人, supeinjin), "Pole" (ポーランド人, pōrandojin), "Japanese [person]" (日本人, nihonjin), and so forth; it is instantly understandable. However, the suffix jin does not normally attach to the names of cities, and the standard terms are tōkyōkko (東京っ子, "person born and/or brought up in Tokyo"), tōkyōtomin (東京都民, "person living in Tokyo"), and tōkyō no hito (東京の人, "person born, brought up, or living in Tokyo").
  3. More strictly, until the October 1995 issue it was published by Tōkyō-to Bunka Shinkō-kai (東京都文化振興会), which subsequently became the Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture; the change taking effect between the October and November 1995 issues.
  • (in Japanese) Tokyojin: the publisher's page advertising the current issue
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