Building upon the first four EAPC conferences in Tokyo, Hangzhou, Seoul, and Hong Kong, this fifth meeting in Taiwan welcomes the participation of members of a younger generation of editors. With three generations of East Asian publishing professionals gathered here, this is a highly significant occasion. Three generations, representing five regions, spanning seven decades -- a period during which our respective histories have been intertwined in the most complex ways. The people in attendance here today are both recorders of and witnesses to that history; as publishers and editors they have given much thought to the past and its ramifications for the present, and they have experienced that past themselves.

The first generation of publishers experienced war and other upheavals; in their aftermath, they were compelled to shoulder the responsibility of reflecting on those events and placing them in historical perspective. Indeed, the historical memory of East Asia provides the spiritual impetus behind their motivation to become publishers. Among our colleagues, Mme. Dong Xiuyu and Messrs. Otsuka Nobukazu, Kato Keiji and Ryusawa Takeshi in particular were participants in a unique period of growth in East Asian publishing. History is like a net from which there is no escape, especially for publishers; it hovers over our thoughts and spirits, and even dictates how we choose to act. I think history is one of the primary forces that impelled these eminent publishers to launch the East Asia Publishers Conference.

In the years following the Second World War, members of this first generation devoted themselves to cultural recovery, a mission that spurred them to devise ambitious publishing projects, cultivate an indefatigable spirit of challenge, and build a robust publishing business. Mr. Otsuka, who worked at Iwanami Shoten from 1963 to 2003, ultimately serving as president, was instrumental in making Iwanami the preeminent house it is. Since our younger days my colleagues and I have admired Iwanami's books and envied the company's quality and success. To us it has been one of the brightest stars in the publishing cosmos. One of Mr. Otsuka's first jobs at Iwanami was as editor of the journal Shiso (Thought). In 2006 I launched a magazine in Taiwan with the same title -- Si Xiang in Chinese (Reflexion in English) -- which I am happy to acknowledge is directly inspired by Shiso.

Mr. Kato spent over three decades as an editor at Misuzu Shobo, during which he planned and edited the 58-volume series Sources of Contemporary History (Gendai Shi Shiryo). This massive project, which assembled documents chronicling the most problematic era of modern Japanese history -- from 1919 to 1945 -- was of a scale appropriate to some grand government undertaking; yet it was carried out by a single private publishing house, and even proved commercially viable for good measure.

Another large-scale publishing project of tremendous significance is the Eastern Library (Toyo Bunko) directed by Mr. Ryusawa during his tenure at Heibonsha. Comprising some 750 titles over the course of 44 years, this series compiled, translated, edited and annotated Japanese, Chinese and Korean classics of literature, history, thought, religion and art. It surely represents the greatest collection of East Asian works produced to date.

The period during which the first generation worked was also the golden age of humanities publishing. Mr. Kato has said that a salient attribute of humanities publishing in Japan during this time was the fact that books of considerable scholarly value were being published by commercial houses. Books that were fortunate to get published by university presses in the West could, in Japan, be commercial successes. This was made possible by a sizable market of readers with a thirst for knowledge and cultural enlightenment. Otherwise a book like the volume Philosophy (Tetsugaku) in the Iwanami Lecture Series could not have sold 100,000 copies.

The second generation of publishers confronted the political forces that emerged after the war. Conditions varied in Korea, Taiwan, and mainland China, but in all these places publishers faced political oppression. In the 1970s and 1980s young people in Korea and Taiwan pursued a democratic resistance movement, while mainland China was in the throes of the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath. Where the first generation shouldered the burden of history, the second generation's fate was to struggle against authoritarian pressures. In Korea, Mr. Ko Se-Hyun was jailed twice between 1979 and 1981 for participating in the democratic movement; Mr. Kim Eoun-Ho lost his newspaper job from 1974 to 1975 for the same reason.

In the 1970s the South Korean government arrested vast numbers of university professors, teachers, journalists, students and other intellectuals. Many of those who were jailed or fired from their jobs went into publishing. Through the publication of books on democratic theory they supported the resistance, influenced the thinking of young people, and provided democracy activists with intellectual weaponry. At the same time they launched a new era in Korean publishing. This is the environment out of which modern Korean publishing grew. When government control prevented newspapers, radio and other media from functioning as a means of critical expression, books took over that role and became the most effective weapon of criticism.

Mr. Kim has described the 1980s as the decade of books and reading in South Korea. Even as the government continued to ban books and arrest authors and publishers, young readers, inspired by books, maintained their resistance. Moreover, it was through reading and publishing books that Koreans came to terms with the issues of national identity and unification, setting the stage for a social movement. Mr. Kim states that only books could have provided the conditions for this by promoting reform and fostering a passionate sense of national identity.

Taiwan, too, was under an authoritarian regime that banned books and arrested writers, and its resistance movement continued through the 1970s and 1980s. As publishers in Taiwan, we provided intellectual backing for the resistance: offering activists an outlet through which to express their views, fostering the spread of books criticizing the status quo, and introducing translations of Western works of democratic theory and contemporary thought. It was without question the most significant period in the history of Taiwanese publishing, one in which intellectuals, publishers and authors all worked closely together toward a common goal.

In both Korea and Taiwan, today's publishing business grew out of the democratic resistance movement, and its initiators were the second generation of publishers. Looking back on that era, I do not think the effort expended by the second generation to achieve democracy was in vain.

Since the late 1990s, however, the foundations of contemporary publishing laid by the first and second generations have been severely shaken. The Internet has altered the way we read, educational reforms have altered the content we read, and the explosion in published titles has altered the very nature of the publishing business. Commercial profit has become the overriding priority of our industry, a prerequisite for survival under increasingly harsh circumstances.

Mr. Kato says that when he looks back on his work for over thirty years on Sources of Contemporary History, produced at a pace of two or three titles per year, it seems like a dream or an ancient fairy tale. In 1988 the company I direct, Linking Publishing, issued the 54-volume Complete Works of Qian Binsi; with a total of 24 million Chinese characters, it is the largest publication of one individual's collected works in Taiwan to date. To compile and print the complete works of this great scholar (also known as Chien Mu, 1895-1990) we enlisted the help of the few remaining artisans doing letterpress printing in Taiwan. Once the series was published they all retired; today there are no more books printed by letterpress in Taiwan. I was witness to the end of an era, just like that described by Sven Birkerts in his book The Gutenberg Elegies.

This is the era of transformation that the third generation of publishers find themselves in. It is an era bedeviled by a curse: the "death of the book." Where does the future of the book lie? And where are its readers? These are challenges the likes of which publishers have never faced before. The third generation can surmount this unprecedented crisis, but to do so it needs more, and more innovative, ideas than were required of the previous two generations.

The practice of reading will never disappear; only its format and method will change. Our job as publishers will be, as always, to provide the best possible content for readers. That this is our fundamental task is amply demonstrated by the accomplishments of the first two generations, and it will remain so in the future.

The present crisis faced by publishing is due in part to the surge of globalization over the past decade. Globalization has brought with it the renewed hegemony of English, a phenomenon with major repercussions in the publishing world. To summarize, then: the first generation of East Asian publishers developed the industry even as they undertook to reflect on and reexamine history, the second generation pursued their profession while responding to a demand for intellectual resources from the West, and the third generation confronted a deluge of Western influence riding in on the wave of globalization.

In the past two or three years, Asian publishers have begun to wake up and address some of the problems we now face. We are now asking: What can we do for ourselves and for Asia as a whole? Are we capable of cooperating more fully with one another? Why can't we read and appreciate the works of writers in our respective neighboring regions?

Among Asian publishers, those of East Asia form the most clearly delineated group. We share a common history that facilitates mutual understanding, similar publishing experiences, and the past precedent of a collective "reading community." Over the centuries China, Korea and Japan have exchanged classical works of literature and culturally influenced one another. At the EAPC Seoul Conference, Mr. Ryusawa cited one example of this exchange. The 17th-century classic Tiangong Kaiwu by Song Yinxing is a systematic compendium of agricultural technology that had a tremendous impact on Japanese industrial development during the Tokugawa Shogunate. Ironically the importance of the Tiangong Kaiwu was not appreciated in China until the 20th century, when a Tokugawa-era edition arrived there from Japan.

To this I would like to add another example from the modern period. Mountain Spirit: Short Stories from Korea and Taiwan, published in 1936 by the Chinese writer Hu Feng, was an "anthology of stories from weak and small nations" that provided Chinese-language translations from the Japanese of works by Taiwanese writers like Yang Kui and Korean writers like Chang Hyok-ju. Hu's translations conveyed the spirit of resistance shared by people in Taiwan, Korea and Japan, and they resonated in all these places. Such instances are proof that a reading community has existed in East Asia for many centuries.

In the course of our discussions over the past four EAPC conferences, we have proposed the creation of an "East Asia Library" series. It is my hope that this fifth conference, with "the vision of future publishing in East Asia" as its theme, will give our younger editors the opportunity to articulate their approaches to publishing on the subject of East Asia. Through this editors' workshop, I believe that our three generations of publishing professionals can form a bond that will inspire new collaborations and achievements in a new age of East Asian publishing.