📚 For three decades the story of Japanese bookstores has been a story about vanishing. Then a survey landed last week showing industry profits up 4.6 times in a single year, with seven in ten companies in the black. The recovery comes to $25.6 million spread across 304 companies, and a surprising share of it came from a world's fair.

Seven in ten in the black, and $84,000 each

Tokyo Shoko Research, a corporate credit research firm, went through the books of 304 companies whose main business is selling books and magazines. Together, in fiscal 2025, covering closings from April 2025 through March 2026, they turned over $3.9 billion and cleared $25.6 million in net profit. The profit figure was 4.6 times the previous year, a 365.4% increase, and the best in five years.

Spread across 304 companies, that is about $84,000 each. The margin works out to 0.6%, up from 0.1% a year earlier, a level the research firm itself calls extremely low against other industries.

Among the 304, 226 companies were in the black, 74.3% of the total, against 228 a year earlier, so the share of profitable firms barely moved. Only 41 companies grew both sales and profit, 13.4% of the total, down from 72 companies, or 23.6%. The biggest single group was the one going backwards on both counts: 87 companies saw both sales and profit fall, 28.6% of the total and the largest group, up from 55 companies, or 18.0%.

The average got better while the typical company got worse. 16 companies with sales above $63 million, 5.2% of the total, accounted for $2.9 billion, or 75.2% of all sales.

Where the money actually came from

Tokyo Shoko Research credits the big chains, and points at a specific shift: the companies doing well are the ones that stopped depending on selling books over a counter.

Maruzen CHI Holdings, which owns the Maruzen and Junkudo store brands, reported $519 million in its store and online segment for the year to January 2026, with segment operating profit of $13.0 million against $2.4 million the year before. The company attributes the jump to strong merchandise sales at its official stores for Expo 2025 Osaka, Kansai. Those two stores sat inside the fairground. They closed when the fair did.

Kinokuniya, the other name in the survey's write-up, posted $894 million in consolidated sales and $30.1 million in net profit for the year to August 2025. Domestic stores brought in $300 million. Institutional sales, the business of supplying universities, laboratories and libraries with books and databases, brought in $344 million. Overseas operations added $220 million. Kinokuniya runs 102 stores in Japan and 47 in 10 other countries as of the end of November 2025, and the part of the company that looks like a bookstore to an ordinary shopper is no longer the part that earns the most.

One company's consolidated net profit, $30.1 million, is larger than the entire 304-company total of $25.6 million. The two figures are not measuring the same thing, since the survey works from company-level records in a credit database rather than consolidated group accounts, so this is not a clean subtraction. It does give a sense of how top-heavy the industry has become.

Further down the size ladder, the pattern repeats without the world's fair. Sanyodo Holdings, a listed regional chain based in Aichi, got 54.8% of sales from books in the year to March 2025, down from 61.8% two years earlier. Trading cards went from a side category to 12.3% of the business. The shelves are still there. They are holding less paper.

The stores keep closing, but new ones opened twice as fast

The count of physical bookstores in Japan fell to 9,993 stores as of the end of March 2026, down from 10,417 a year earlier, according to the registry maintained by the Japan Publishing Organization for Information Infrastructure Development. Against 24,237 stores in fiscal 1998, that is roughly four in ten still standing. 493 municipalities, about 28% of the country, had no bookstore at all as of November 2024.

Inside that decline, though, is a line that moved the other way. 102 new stores opened in fiscal 2025, up from 57 the year before. Closures eased slightly too: 499 stores closed in fiscal 2025, against 537 the year before.

Part of the explanation is that starting a bookstore got cheaper. Stocking new releases used to mean posting a large deposit with a wholesaler, which priced out anyone without capital. Small-volume supply services, Tohan's HONYAL and Rakuten Books Network's Foyer among them, have since appeared, and the government's own review credits them with the rise in small, distinctive shops. That is the ministry's reading rather than a statistically demonstrated cause, but the opening count is consistent with it.

The exit side is also quieter. 71 bookstore companies closed, dissolved or went bankrupt in 2025, down from 85 the year before, including seven bankruptcies, down 30.0% year on year. Tokyo Shoko Research offers a blunt explanation for the calm: the companies that were going to fail may already have done so.

Why a Japanese bookstore struggles to make money

The market itself is shrinking. The Research Institute for Publications puts sales of printed books and magazines at $6.1 billion in 2025, down 4.1% and below the one trillion yen line for the first time since the 1970s, a milestone we looked at separately.

But the thin margins are older than the decline. A review published by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry found that bookstores keep a gross margin of about 22%, with wholesalers taking 7% to 8% and publishers the rest. On a paperback, the shop is working for roughly a fifth of the cover price.

Two customs explain the rest. Books arrive on consignment, which means unsold copies go back, and about three in ten books come back, four in ten for magazines. Somebody pays to ship all of that in both directions, and fuel and driver wages have not been getting cheaper.

The second is price. Books in Japan sit under an exemption from antitrust law known as resale price maintenance: the publisher sets one price for the whole country and the shop sells at it. Electricity goes up, rent goes up, wages go up, and the cover price sits where the publisher left it.

The government's answer, a package of measures published on June 10, 2025, is mostly modest: subsidies for renovations, RFID tags to cut stocktaking labour, help with succession for owners with no heir. The competition regulator goes further. The Japan Fair Trade Commission has narrowed it to two routes for a shop to absorb rising costs: the publisher, which sets the price, prices with the shop's economics in view, or the shop is handed a bigger cut. It plans to put that to the industry's trade bodies. The money has to come from somewhere up the chain, and nobody upstream has volunteered.

In the US and Britain, bookshops are multiplying

The usual telling has Amazon and e-books wiping out English-language bookshops while Japan, protected by fixed prices, kept its network intact. The Associated Press reported in May 2026 that the belief is still widespread in the US, and that the decline it describes ended years ago.

The United States added 605 independent bookstores in 2025. Membership of the American Booksellers Association grew 19%, to over 3,400 member companies running close to 3,800 shops, and it was the fifth straight year with more than 200 openings. Barnes & Noble opened more than 60 stores in 2025 and passed 700 locations. In Britain and Ireland, independent bookshops rose from 1,025 to 1,086, the highest level since 2012, recovering from a low of 867 shops in 2016. 77 bookshops now run a café or bar inside the store. Both the American and British figures count trade-association members rather than every shop in the country, so they do not line up with Japan's registry total. Both are rising while Japan's count falls.

Britain got there without any price protection at all. Its Net Book Agreement, a fixed-price arrangement that began in 1900, collapsed in September 1995 when major publishers walked away, and the Restrictive Practices Court struck it down in March 1997 as contrary to the public interest. The independents were hit hard for years. Then the number bottomed out and started climbing.

Japan has kept its rules. France kept stricter ones, since the 1981 Lang Law caps discounts on books at 5%, and a 2014 amendment barred online retailers from combining that discount with free shipping. And it is Japan's count that kept falling, while Britain's, unprotected, bottomed out and recovered.

Fixed prices look like neither the cure nor the disease. They kept a national network of shops alive far longer than an open market would have, and they also locked those shops out of the price lever every other retailer has used against inflation. What the American and British recoveries have in common is not a price rule but a product mix: cafés, events, community, things a shipping box cannot do. Japan's own winners in this survey found the same answer through Expo merchandise, trading cards and university contracts.

If bookstores can only earn a living by selling something other than books, what exactly has been rescued? How do the bookshops near you make their rent?

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