On a recent trip to Hong Kong, my traveling companions and I found a lovely shop Japanese bookshop. When I say “found”, I mean that we were wandering about and stopped when we saw the sign.

As a moderate consumer of Japanese TV shows, Japanese movies and the occasional j-rock band, I felt duty-bound to check it out. I didn’t speak Japanese so I didn’t own any Japanese books (except for a few manga titles in English), but I did collect magazines that featured, uh, boys of important cultural significance.

 
It turns out they had a lot of Japanese language books. And I took a good long while browsing through them because book design in non-English languages was fascinating.

Look at the covers! I kinda want to design a book in a foreign language someday.

Of course, book design for the inside pages in a language I don’t understand will be tricky. Someone teach me Japanese, please?

Japanese characters are so pretty. But then maybe I just think that because I can’t read them.

Alas, no music magazines featuring OOR.

The staff at Tomato Books were very pleasant and helpful. When I go back to HK, I’m definitely visiting the shop again.