Kinokuniya Bookstore

Uwajimaya is probably the king of Asian Grocery on the left coast.  Founded and based in Seattle, my family and I have sort of started making it a point to go there every time we are in the city.  To be fair, it's my little sister that makes it a point to go and makes sure that not one of us forgets that "we still need to go to Uwajimaya!"

While the grocery itself is amazing and a lot of fun to visit and explore for a bit, the Kinokuniya Bookstore that adjoins the Asian market is mind boggling.  The bookstore teems with shelves upon shelves of Asian language books, the overwhelming majority of which are Japanese manga.  Japan takes comic book culture to a whole different level than what many of us grew up with.  There is no Amazing Spiderman, Silver Surfer, or Green Lantern.  Surely, there are the equivalents and Japan's own superhero genre (Dragonball Z anyone?  Awesome.) but there are also thousands of comics about sports, mystery, school, gossip, dating, romance, aliens, fighting, adolescence, you name it.  And yes, plenty of (too many, really) comic books about school girls.  Maybe they're not actually about school girls.  Maybe they just feature them on a lot of different covers.

What's really interesting about this manga culture is that while a lot of us see comics and scream "nerd alert!", it seems totally acceptable in Japan for all ages to sit and read a comic instead of the newspaper while riding the subway or waiting for the bus.  I saw this with my own eyes while I was in Japan this summer.

I promise, those photos are on the way.  You'll see them...eventually!