The story "Tokyo's Jinbocho is a must-visit for lovers of antiquarian books" in the July 6 edition prompted me to write something about the district. We were educated to read a lot of good books, not by using a computer, over 50 years ago. I went to Jinbocho from Sendai two or three times a year to get good books.
The trip was exciting and it was a chance to be intellectual. I mainly visited Kitazawa Bookstore and Isseido Bookstore where we could buy English books and dictionaries. For instance, I got "Dictionary Of English Philology" by Sanki Ichikawa, the father of English philology in Japan, and dictionaries by Hidesaburo Saito, a shipbuilding engineer who was educated at a special English training school sponsored by the Meiji government as part of the "Westernization" and "modernization" drive of those days.
Even if it is now an era of computers, we still need printed books and dictionaries like those. I do hope that they will be prosperous forever.
The opinions expressed in this letter to the editor are the writer's own and do not necessarily reflect the policies of The Japan Times.
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