Troublemakers magazine embraces “misfits”
We delivered Troublemakers magazine to our subscribers in August, so last month editors Yuto Miyamoto and Manami Inoue joined me for a Stack Magazine Club conversation about their publishing journey so far. I love the calm and quietness of Troublemakers, which seems so at odds with the magazine’s name, until you realise the kind of trouble that Yuto and Manami are interested in.
For them, publishing within the strict constraints of Japan’s hierarchical and intensely ordered society, a troublemaker is anyone who refuses to conform to the norms. As Yuto put it during our conversation, “If you are a troublemaker, that means you are brave to make troubles, and you are brave enough to say something critical that other people don’t want to say. So we were like, ‘Oh, that’s cool. We’re gonna be troublemakers.'”
Their launch issue was received well both at home in Japan and overseas, and in our conversation they talk about taking confidence from that. Troublemakers is never going to be about celebrities, but they say they were initially concerned at how they could convince readers to care about the relatively ordinary people on the magazine’s pages. Buoyed by the success of the first issue, though, they felt emboldened to lean into the ordinariness of the people they featured, making Troublemakers magazine into a wonderfully intimate shapshot of contemporary Japan.
If you haven’t seen this one yet, head over to our shop page and buy a copy for yourself. Or, if you’d like to receive a different independent magazine every month, sign up for the Stack subscription, and then join us for our Magazine Club evenings, where you can hear from the people who make the magazines we deliver.
