Health Warnings 28 February 1988

Trevor Leggett was head of the Japanese Department of the BBC.

This is one of his broadcasts to Japan

Zubari for 28 February 1988

Hello listeners. In Japan, there is the slogan; KENKO NO TAME NI SUISUGI NI CHUI SHIMASHO. We have a similar one in Britain, though it’s more impersonal: SMOKING CAN SERIOUSLY DAMAGE YOUR HEALTH. I should like to invent another slogan: KENKO NO TAME NI, DOKUSHO NI CHUI SHIMASHO.

Several very big bookshops have opened in different parts of London recently. This is a good sign; probably it means that people are getting tired of television. I went into a new one the other day. It was during the lunch-hour. In one distant corner, I noticed a girl assistant sitting on the floor, surrounded by books. She had been putting them on to shelves, but now she was reading.

Well, it was the lunch hour, so perhaps that was her free time. But it reminded me of my own library at home. I have about 4,000 books, and periodically I resolve to re-arrange them for cataloguing. But always, soon after I begin, I find an interesting book which I had forgotten that I owned. I begin to read it, and the arranging stops.

When I saw that girl assistant reading, I thought that reading must be always a temptation for assistants in a bookshop.

When I was a small boy, there were many small sweet-shops, mostly owned by old women. Usually she had a young boy of about 10 years to help her.

My mother once asked one of the old women how she could prevent the small boys from stealing sweets habitually. She said: “I don’t forbid them to take sweets. In their first week, I tell them they can eat anything, and I encourage them to eat sweets. Then they become terribly sick, and after that they don’t like sweets.”

Well, it seemed a clever idea. But I don’t think it would work with reading books.  Somehow, keen readers never get sick of reading.

And as I publish books myself, I am glad that they do not. I just hope that the readers’ health is not too much damaged!

© Trevor Legget