Koenji is a nice, quiet place in the suburbs, but venturing along its Kitanaka Street one weekend last March, you could not have missed the commotion coming out of Shirouto no Ran No. 12. Crammed inside this small rental space, dozens of people were poring over, discussing and exchanging piles upon piles of booklets bursting with eye-catching imagery and color. The get-together was the biggest yet for Japanese "zinedom": the 4th Tokyo Zinester Gathering, a two-day event devoted to making, trading and selling zines.

Confused? If so, that's probably because zinedom is a mostly underground world that exists below the radar of the mainstream media. Nowadays everybody is familiar with blogs, but relatively few people know that a long time before the Internet, there was a whole community of independent publishers who more or less did the same thing bloggers do today, but on paper. Even today, in the age of the blogosphere, zine-making remains a global phenomenon with thousands of practitioners. Try a simple online search for "zines" and you'll end up with millions of hits.

Born around the mid-1800s, when the first small home-printing machines allowed people to produce their own journals on the cheap, zines are unadulterated, unfiltered purveyors of creative ideas and honest opinions. Even today, most zines are cheap, independently published booklets, generally created by a single person, either in the classic cut-and-glue style typical of zinedom's DIY philosophy, or with the help of a computer. The zine-maker is responsible for the whole production process, from providing all the content to actually photocopying, folding, stapling and distributing each copy.