Sharon Domier's blog

Shinsho ?? are an amazing resource for people who are looking to gain a generalist’s knowledge of a particular topic. The regular shinsho are written at a level that a high school graduate can read and understand. The prices of shinsho are entirely reasonable (currently 600-900 yen) and pocket-sized so they are light and convenient to carry around and read at opportune moments. They tend to be about 200 pages long, so while it is a significant commitment of time, it is not overwhelming.

I love shinsho and would highly recommend that grad students look for a shinsho or a ny?monsho ??? on their topic before they turn to scholarly writings. When I visited Japanese university libraries, most had collections of shinsho shelved by their labels (publishers and series) on open browsing shelves. I have always wanted to do the same, but instead I have been carefully choosing shinsho on the topics covered by our faculty and hope that they don’t get lost in the stacks.

Now though, there are junior shinsho ?????? that are aimed at middle school and high school students. These are really perfect for students who are working towards N2 or building up vocabulary and fluency for N1. I will be adding a number of these to my READ Japanese collection. I just need to do a little more work to figure out what level (in my collection, it would likely be level 6 or 7)

Last summer I visited a special exhibit on shinsho for kids held at the Chiyoda Library. The list of titles exhibited was long and substantial, and I felt like my interest in shinsho was validated.

Here are possibly the two best labels for junior/senior high school shinsho:

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Iwanami’s Junior shinsho was probably the first one to appear on the market, starting in 1979. There are now about a thousand volumes, so plenty to choose from to build a small collection of reading materials for upper level Japanese readers who aren’t quite ready for the regular research collection.

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Purim? shinsho is a much much newer series, but I saw a lot of titles that I thought would be appealing to students (and myself). In particular, I see books in this series by Yoshimoto Banana and Ogawa Y?ko.

This article provides a good overview of why Japanese middle/high school students should try reading shinsho.