Japanese notebooks

A choose your own loose leaf adventure

About as far back as I can remember, I have always carried a notebook and something to write with. Whether it was for drawing comic books to keep myself occupied on road trips as a kid, or jotting down yet another app idea, I always have pen and paper at the ready.

When I was in college I spent a summer in Tokyo studying at a language school in Shinkuju. After registration, the day before school started, the teachers took us on a short walk to Sekaido to pick up some school supplies. I was awestruck; floor after floor filled with art supplies for mediums I didn’t know existed, all manner of writing utensils, and a slew of highly customizable notebooks.

Pick a size you like, find a binder that suits you, and start grabbing packets of paper to fill it in: blank, ruled in numerous line heights, grids from large to nearly microscopic, vertical ruled for writing in Japanese, staff paper for music, planners, folders, tabs, zippy pouches to hold your pens, and it just wouldn’t be Japan if you didn’t have the option to have it all emblazoned with Hello Kitty. More recently, there have been paper types that help bridge the gap between analog and digital. Shot Note paper works with an Android app to digitize your notes, and works well with Evernote too.

All of the binders have a ringed comb that pops open when you pull a tab so you can add more paper, rearrange your notebook, or pull a page out without having those fringey tear off bits you would get with a spiral. If you use a GTD system and are constantly moving post-it tabs around, or have ever found yourself cringing as you tear a page out of your Moleskine, a Japanese binder notebook may be a wise purchase.

They can be a bit tricky to find at a decent price stateside, but Amazon usually has a few and some options on paper as well. I scooped up the orange one pictured above in San Francisco’s Japantown earlier this year.

So if you are in the market for a new notebook and would like to pick and choose what pages go where, then do some looking around online for B5 binders and build your next notebook the way they do in Shinjuku.