Are you a book lover? If you are, I suspect you already do this: when you travel abroad, you find yourself walking into a local bookstore. I do it everywhere, not only in Japan but also abroad. My shelves hold some Chinese and Russian books even though I cannot read a word of them. A bookstore is one of the best places to understand the local culture: what people there are curious about, what they worry about, what they love. But lately I’ve become obsessed with another kind of book place: local libraries. I know that reading books is a trend among young people all over the world, and here in Japan, a big trend is emerging from libraries. I recently read a Japanese book called 『 都市のような図書館をつくる 』—Building a library like a city. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been translated into English yet, but it captures precisely what libraries in Japan are trying to become a core of local community.…