On the 20th Anniversary of This Blog’s Launch

The date of the very first post on this blog is May 16, 2005. Accordingly, it marks the 20th anniversary in May 2025.

The total number of posts comes to 2,119. Twenty years amount to 240 months, or 1,043 weeks. That translates to an average of 8 posts per month, or 2 per week. Should this be considered few, or average? At the very least, it’s certainly not a large number.

The blog title, 「本に溺れたい Hon ni Oboretai」, was just a spontaneous idea. It simply expressed my desire to live a life immersed in books, indulging in reading as much as possible. I once worked at a secondhand bookstore for about ten years. Even during my student years and after entering the workforce, hunting for used books had been a treasured hobby of mine. So I impulsively jumped into the industry, as a natural extension of that passion. And indeed, I ended up spending my days surrounded by old books.

What I came to realize most acutely through my work in the antiquarian book trade was that there may be nothing truly new in this world. For me, handling secondhand books was a job, so of course I didn’t have the luxury of leisurely reading them while working. However, as part of my job, I always had to inspect the physical condition and binding of each book. Assuming I examined around 100 books a day, that would come to roughly 30,000 books in a year. I continued this line of work for ten years. That means I came into contact with at least 300,000 old books. Even if I didn’t read them, I certainly glanced at them. As a result, when something is praised as “new” or “original” in the world, I often find myself thinking, “Wait, hasn’t that already been written somewhere...?” Even issues that are heatedly discussed as if they were novel often strike me as “Here we go again, the same old things.”

Therefore, when I want to learn something “new” and unknown to me, I don’t just search online for the latest information (though I do that as well); rather, I’ve come to rely on exploring secondhand books or older records. And in almost every case, I manage to find precedents or historical examples. This is why, no matter how “new” something may appear, I now have the habit of first looking into the “old” to understand the true “newness” of the matter more deeply—this has become my approach to inquiry.

Eventually, as I engaged with this mixed, unorganized, and often chaotic mass of knowledge, I began to notice that certain things classified under Category A would reveal unexpected commonalities when viewed from the perspective of things in Category B. Or, items a and b, though seemingly unrelated, could be seen as similar when viewed from the vantage of Category C. And once framed in terms of Category C, the result could actually be misleading—prompting the need to create a new category or term altogether. However, because I haven’t always been able to construct that new terminology successfully, some concepts remain pending and are temporarily forced into existing categories. That is why this blog contains what may seem like an annoyingly large number of article categories.

Now, when I glance around the area near where I’m typing at this PC keyboard, I’m forced to admit—whether I like it or not—that I am indeed “drowning in books.” There are probably around 3,000 volumes here, including both large-format and pocket-sized books. Almost all of them are secondhand. New publications are rare. Yet this vast horde of old books does not appear “old” to me. They are the fruits of my pursuit of new knowledge.

Even if I were to live to the age of 81—the average life expectancy for a Japanese man today—I would likely never finish reading them all. In that sense, the dream I had around the time I began this blog (in fact, the danger had already started back then)—the dream of “drowning in books”—has been fully realized.

And yet, every month, I still find myself ordering several more books from ama***/.co.jp/.com or from 日本の古**（Nihon no Ko**）, endlessly wandering the corridor between regret and delight.