Books: Clubby Magazines

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was a "super-magazine," five years in the planning, a publication for "old and young, regardless of sex or occupation." The first issue (New Year's Day, 1925) consisted of 640,000 copies. A year later one and a half million copies were printed. Only one field was left. Yonen Club "is now as familiar among the little children of Japan as apples and chocolates."

Author Noma shies from the "indelicate task" of giving details about his wealth and position. "Two or three" of his magazines command sales of over a mil lion, "hardly one" falls below 1,000,000. "At high tide" his two houses receive daily a quarter-million communications, spend 7,000 yen ($2,400) on postage. He fails to give the figures of his personal fortune, but speaks of a dozen estates in and near Tokyo, of seven million yen invested in stocks and shares. But "money is a foul thing, making the man mean who looks at it. How I had toiled and sweated for it!" Fearing its degrading influence he refused to look at any for a long time.

When he started, Noma was accused of being a reckless innovator, a headlong speculator, an undignified sham. Now he finds himself charged with being a de liberate bourgeois exploiter of the masses. His attitude is that of most big publishers. He feels that his work has been valuable, patriotic, but thinks in terms of business policy, circulation, profits. Authors, editors, ideas and literary problems play little part in his story. But of each new venture he always asked "whether [it] was moral in its tendency, that is, whether it was going to do good to the world."

*In Japanese magazine publishing, the English word "club" is used in titles to indicate a figurative gathering place for readers for purposes of fun or enlightenment.