It could be, but it could also be the case that he's trying to be 'quirky' and happened to implement this particular idea, picked more-or-less randomly from a set of other quirky ideas. Walking around Tokyo it is not hard to find shops where you really struggle to figure out how they are making money, and often it's the case that they actually aren't and they close their doors after a few months or a couple years.
I guess it's just really easy to get a loan in Japan even if your business plan is utter shit?
strategy 1 = idealism
strategy 2 = realism
strategy 3 = pragmatism
This isn't an accurate description of the current bookselling climate. Two counter-points:
http://fortune.com/2015/09/23/e-books-digital-publishing/
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2015/12/barn...
Digital e-book sales are on a sharp decline now, and normal booksellers are stabilizing.
The board game analogy is pretty apt. In The Settlers of Catan, players compete to reach 10 Victory Points by developing a robust and healthy colony. Settlements are worth one VP each, and upgrading one to a city makes it worth two. The city also pays out double resources, and it's relatively difficult to stop a player from building cities. I might observe that players who win tend build all their settlements and upgrade as many of them into cities as possible, so I decide going into this game that's what I'll do. I decided on that strategy without actually taking this game's state into account, and I will probably not do very well if this game is unlike games I've seen before.
Alternately, I might just build whatever seems appropriate given the resources I'm getting. This is "playing the board." The strategy for this game is based on the current game's state, not general knowledge of the game's rules in a vacuum or observations of prior games.
If someone studies historical trends and concludes that people with skills related to broadly applicable inventions will get paid a lot, like people who can make steam engines or program computers, they're using the first strategy. They didn't look at today's conditions at all, they noted that life in general seems to cause good salaries and specific types of skills to coexist. If they instead just show up to their first day of college, look up the average starting salaries for recent graduates in every department, and join one with the highest number that they feel confident they can graduate from, they're using the second strategy. The end result could be identical and they wind up writing software either way, but the strategies were formed using totally different methods.
"Playing to luck" is different than "playing to the board" in my book because it requires making probabilistic decisions that have no place in, say, Chess.
In life, people can pick one of three strategies. The first is they can fantasise about what kind of car they want, what kind of job they'd like, what kind of girlfriend they'd have, and then try their best to make these "achievements", often falling short because the world is not fantasy. The second, they observe what kind of random elements the world exhibiting, e.g. "Oh these days accountants make lots of money", "These days Software Engineers have high salaries" and directly translate to mean "I am going to learn programming, even if I don't like it", and then they are playing to other people's fantasy rather than accepting their own strengths or weaknesses. Or thirdly, they can "play to the board" and make the best of what life gives them, at each moment in time.
The bookshop-keeper here, is eking out every single edge he can out of books to operate his shop. Where 30 years ago operating a successful physical bookshop might mean having a large selection available at any time, and frequent events to draw crowds, today, in competition with digital books, operating a successful physical bookshop might mean emphasising the advantages of the physical book, the romanticism attached to physical objects. I get the feeling he is the type who sees what the world is like today, and because he's got experience bookshop-keeper, not a software engineer or tech startup founder, he goes with the flow with what he's got.
Where in a board game, the game board is the entirety of the world, and can be considered by itself, in the real world, our own selves are part of the board - and I can't always do it, but I aspire to do what I can to play with what I've got, like the man depicted in this article.