Hachinohe City, Aomori Prefecture, operates a public bookstore, which is rare in the country. The city opened the public bookstore “Hachinohe Book Center” in 2016. In fiscal 2022, the city had income of about 27 million yen from book sales, but operating costs were 97 million yen. Hachinohe City has made up for a deficit of 70 million yen. Hachinohe City aims to position itself as a base for urban development through books and to use it to promote interaction between residents. At Hachinohe National College of Technology, students are choosing books to be put into the library at the Hachinohe Book Center. This activity increases opportunities for students to come into contact with books by freely choosing books from the library’s collection. The challenge is the profitability of the book center. Hachinohe City cannot afford to increase its deficit further. Ingenuity to overcome this challenge is required.
The profitability of the book center is an issue. A hint to overcome this challenge lies in hamburgers. It is said that hamburgers alone are not profitable. There is a system in which profits are made by selling them in a set with a high-profit margin product. This is a method that is used not only for hamburgers, but also in restaurants and supermarkets. Some areas are in the red, but other areas make up for it. In Hachinohe City, the book center is in the red, but it is also seen as making profits by improving the education and health of its citizens.
Dementia is a concern for every country. More than 50 million people around the world already suffer from this disease. Numerous studies have been conducted on this disease. The findings that have emerged from these studies have shown that health management alone is not enough to prevent dementia. Among them, interesting evidence has emerged. The unexpected news that “Japanese people live longer without developing dementia” spread around the world in the spring of 2022. The epicenter of the news was a study compiled by Stanford University and the University of Tokyo in the United States and its estimates. The conventional understanding of dementia was that the more people age, the more likely they are to develop dementia. However, an analysis by Stanford University showed that people with higher educational levels (those with reading habits) have a lower incidence of dementia. The prediction that dementia is decreasing among Japanese people raises the hope that reading habits can help prevent dementia. And what makes this hope more realistic is the development of a good reading environment. The activities of local bookstores are deeply involved in the development of this reading environment.
