Swing Journal Sayonara

[kinuta]

Sad to hear that the venerable Swing Journal is calling it a day.

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20100519b2.html

[mjzee]

Yes, sad. A friend of mine used to have copies. The layouts, the quality of the photos, the texture of the paper were all wonderful. I don't read a word of Japanese, so the articles were indecipherable, but I'd love to leaf through them nonetheless.

[Chas]

Looks like the Swing Journal is an early victim of Japan's demographic hara-kiri.

As a gaijin, leafing through an issue was like returning to pre-literate childhood where image is all. And the images were fascinating. Pictures of impossibly rare album covers and labels; images of what I imagined to be executives of Sony or Toshiba sitting in their 30 m² flats next to their high-end stereo, with jazz records stacked floor to ceiling, a few ultra-obscurities proudly in hand; scores of tiny record stores (sometimes with charming engrish names) advertising records previously thought to have been chimerical. Only straitened circumstances kept me from contacting a JAL ticket agent.

I still have a couple of old copies somewhere. I bet some of the articles are worth reading, though I daren't subject them to the haiku-like renderings of Google's language tools.