Read While Standing

I'm sure you've seen it. A bookstore, people inside browsing, taking their time to read through a little bit of a book before deciding to buy it or not. Maybe some bookstores even stretch into a bit of mild luxury with some nice furnishings for their customers to take a break. But Japanese bookstores are different.

There's a term in Japanese, 立ち読み tachiyomi, meaning to read while standing. If you ever walk into a Japanese bookstore, you will invariably see people standing in front of a row of books, heads bent, perusing (especially in the magazine section) or even full-out reading books that they may or may not buy.

(tachiyomi)

I had my first interesting brush with tachiyomi the other day. I'm tutoring a former student of mine and I went looking for some good reference books for her vocabulary building. I picked up two books and wanted to compare words using the index, but I had a hard time trying to flip back and forth between the two, one in each hand. I happened to be standing near a desk with a chair (probably for clerk use), so I rolled the chair out. I hadn't even started to lower my body when a clerk came up and told me, "No sitting."

Now, to be honest, he simply might not have wanted me to sit in the chair since it looked like it might be for use by clerks. But my first thought was, "Oh yeah. No sitting in bookstores here." So I crouched next to the desk and flipped through a few pages, settling on one book over the other.

Tachiyomi can be a good thing, too. Say you just want to check out an article in a magazine that just came out (but you don't want to waste the paper or your cash), you can just stand and read. Say you just have 30 minutes to kill before you have to meet a friend, you can just stand and read. And I bet if you were even a cheapskate, you could find enough time to finish a novel.