Telephone companies and the Tokyo book trade

In the last ten days Laquedem Manor has received four sets of telephone books from four different companies.  Three sets (and maybe all four) will find their way to the recycling bin this weekend.

In looking through these compendia, I was struck by the fact that two of the volumes include white pages (residential listings) bound together with the yellow pages (commercial advertising), in both cases in a yellow cover looking like a yellow pages volume.  We have gone several years without receiving a white pages volume.  I discovered on our shelf of telephone books the white pages for 2001-02.  We have been happily using that book for years without noticing or caring that it’s outdated, rather like Jean Giraudoux’s Mad Woman of Chaillot, who read the same issue of the newspaper every day.

I’m told that in Tokyo the telephone company brings around the new volumes — eight or ten of them, because the city is so large — once or twice a year, and most households don’t keep them.  Instead, they give the unwanted books to the paper recyclers who follow close behind the telephone book deliverers, and the recyclers give the householders toilet paper in exchange.  Mrs. Laquedem and I can buy our own toilet paper, but we wouldn’t say no to a recycler who offered us shoeboxes.