CONTRIBUTED BY JANNINE MYERS

 
As is typically the case, the source of many of my post ideas are often inspired by events that have transpired during the previous week or month. One such event which conjured up the idea for this post took place several weeks ago, while enjoying a catch-up conversation with a friend. As we were getting ready to part ways, my friend mentioned that he planned on making a stop on his way home at the local Tsutaya bookstore; he was keen to go and check out the stacks of “mooks” available and see if he could find any that detailed the most recent Casio G-shock watches.

“Mooks?” I enquired. To which my friend replied, “You don’t know what a mook is!” I was quickly enlightened by my friend who informed me that a mook is a cross between a magazine and a book.

Now I know some of you are rolling your eyes right now, thinking to yourselves how incredibly uninformed I am, but I had seriously never heard of a mook until just that moment. And I have to believe that some of you out there have also been oblivious to this uniquely named, but so unsurprisingly Japanese contrivance. So anyway, my curiosity having been piqued, I decided to head over to Tsutaya myself and find out more about these so-called mooks.

Upon entering the store I really had no idea where to start looking, but I figured they had to be near the magazines. They were in fact interspersed among the various stacks of magazines, but you had to look closely to determine which were magazines and which were mooks. There are mooks available on virtually every topic you can imagine: sports, fashion, computers, travel, cooking, art, bikes, cars, business, health, etc. The only problem, at least for me, is that I really couldn’t see that there was any major difference between mooks and magazines.

 
 
Some of these are magazines and some of these are mooks, it's hard to tell the difference....

According to GonzoCircus, an online magazine dedicated to contemporary pop and subculture, “mooks target and obsess over a specific topic such as a fashion trend, a persona or any other topic you can think about,” and “.....are at least 150 pages thick.” However, the mooks I picked up didn’t look any thicker than their magazine counterparts and some of them seemed to be full of just pictures and ads. If I knew how to read more than just Japanese katakana and hiragana I might have been able to figure out what it is about the mook that is so appealing to Japanese readers. But alas, I am stumped!

Does anyone out there know what makes the mook a publishing phenomenon in Japan? If so, do tell…..