Reiko Togo has been very dissatisfied with Japan's magazine industry for a very long time. "Magazines have become just vehicles for advertisements, and there are none I want to read," she says.

As a writer herself, 57-year-old Togo feels that despite the vast number of titles available, "their contents are so weak that people feel there is no need to read them, so instead they just watch television or browse the Internet."

But unlike most of Japan's millions of malcontents, Togo and several other like-minded women got together and decided to act -- to form a publishing house to launch a new magazine themselves.