Thursday 15 January 2015

One Fine Afternoon In The Bookshop.

Various full color attractive veg cooking books are displayed in B2S. In Thailand basically there is the well know “Jay” which is Buddhist food without any animal ingredient just like vegan food, and also some specific herbs like garlic are not used for health reasons (related to traditional Chinese medicine), and the lesser popular “Mangsawirat”, which means lacto ovo vegetarian and has no connection with a religion.
The book in the middle is Mangsawirat. It looks trendy and goes with the modern “eat less meat” trend. Great job!
The book at the right, look at that! My fav!! A Jay food recipe book with great tasty vegan recipes and attractive full color photos. The yellow Jay sign cleverly is not in the usual old fashioned  Chinese style but a modern Thai style font. The sub title reads “Vegan Food”. That’s right! It is vegan food; no animal ingredients  for ethical reasons just like us western vegans. 



My next pleasant surprise in the book shop is when I see this children’s book about sharks.
“When sharks attack it is by mistake.”

 “Sharks are threatened by excessive fishing.” 
The author of this precious and gentle educational book is a certain mr. Tatsu Nagata of the Tokyo Research Center. That should be a mild kick in the head to some western vegan bigots out there. :-)

"Good kids salute the national flag."

One of my favorite things that I like to do is reading. When I was a child I used to browse through the public libraries shelves and just read book after book after book, just any topic would be fine, except books about “sports” or “cars” and other similar exciting books.

Anyway. Tokyo was absolutely fabulous and that is an understatement. Bookshops with 6 or 7 or more large floors filled withbooks books books and …more books, are common in Tokyo, and full with customers. Japanese people love to read.

Any of these mega book shops always has a great selection of books in the English language. Besides the Foreign Language section I always would walk around and look at what’s new, the Japanese books, the magazines, the latest veg cooking book by a Japanese author…

All of these great mega bookshops also sold my self-published bilingual Japan Vegan Restaurant Pocketguide quiet successfully. Pat pat on my back.

Thailand is a tat different when it comes to the noble art of reading a book. I will keep it at that.
In Bangkok there are two branches of my favorite Japanese book shop Kinokuniya. These Bangkok book shops have a great selection, including a selection of Chinese, Japanese, and English books. Their customers are largely Japanese ex pats, western ex pats, and Thai people from Chinese descendants. Few regular Thai people.

In a regular Thai book shop like B2S (still didn’t figure out what it stands for, I mean, I know BS but why the 2 in the middle..?) the most prominent books displayed with a flashy full color cover are books about making money, to become successful in business, “self improvement”, books about how to use Face Book on your mobile telephone, and books about how to use all kind of computer programs.


Today I was pleasantly surprised though to see a whole selection of veg cooking books prominently displayed. Some staff must be a vegetarian is my guess. J Thumbs up.

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