A guide to Japanese stationery, from a man who owns too much of it

Why Japanese stationery is different

The short answer is that Japan never stopped caring about handwriting.

In the West, the biro arrived in the 1940s and most people stopped thinking about pens after that. In Japan, a culture that uses three writing systems simultaneously — hiragana, katakana, and kanji — kept demanding tools that could actually handle the complexity of the written language. Fine tips. Ink that flows without skipping. Paper that doesn't bleed.

The result, seventy years later, is that Japan produces the best everyday writing instruments in the world. Not the most expensive — that's still Germany and France. Not the most prestigious — fountain pen culture has its own hierarchies. But the most usable. The best pens for people who actually draw, letter, sketch, and write.

The other thing that makes Japanese stationery different is the approach to design. Muji famously exported this — the idea that a notebook doesn't need to be anything other than a notebook. No branding on the cover. No motivational quote inside the front page. Just paper, bound, in a format that fits a pocket or a bag. The stationery itself is the point.

Where to start: the pen

If you draw or letter and you've never used a Japanese gel pen, this is the single highest-return purchase you can make.

Pilot Juice (ジュース) is where most people land first, and it's the right place to start. The ink is smooth in a way that feels almost frictionless — nothing like the slightly gummy drag of most Western gel pens. The tip is fine enough for detailed work (I use the 0.5mm for most things) but lays down enough ink that lines feel confident rather than scratchy.

The metallic set — gold, silver, four shimmer shades — is particularly useful for lettering work and illustration highlights. If you do any dark-paper work or hand-lettering, a set of Pilot Juice metallic pens will change what you reach for.

Pilot have been making pens in Tokyo since 1918. They're one of Japan's three great pen manufacturers — alongside Zebra and Pentel — and the Juice line sits in the sweet spot between cheap-and-functional and expensive-and-precious. Under £20 for a set. Use them until they run out. Buy more.

For calligraphy and brush lettering specifically, Tombow Fudenosuke is the other essential. Two tips — soft and hard — from a single pen. Tombow have been making stationery in Tokyo since 1913 and the Fudenosuke is their best-known export for a reason: it's the brush pen that actually works for beginners. The soft tip is forgiving enough that you can learn the basic strokes without fighting the tool; the hard tip gives you the control for finer letterforms. Two pens for under five pounds. The most obvious thing I can say is that this is worth buying immediately.

The notebook question

This is where Japanese stationery gets opinionated.

The Western notebook market is dominated by Moleskine and Leuchtturm1917. Both are fine. Both have adequate paper. Both are slightly overpriced for what they are, and both are designed primarily to look good on an Instagram flatlay rather than to be written in by someone who actually uses a fountain pen or a gel pen every day.

The Midori MD notebook is designed for the latter person.

Designphil developed the MD paper formula in the 1960s for the Japanese market and have been refining it since. The paper is cream rather than white — a deliberate choice, because cream is easier on the eyes over long sessions. It's heavier than it looks, has almost no show-through even with a wet nib, and takes every ink I've put on it without feathering. The binding is sewn with cheesecloth and opens completely flat; there's no fighting the spine to write in the margins.

The design is nothing. A plain cover, the MD logo in the corner, a small “Made in Japan” in the opposite corner. Nothing on the spine. Nothing on the back. This is considered a feature, not a failure of marketing.

I use mine for project thinking — the kind of rough visual thinking I can't do on a screen. Layouts, proportions, thumbnail sketches, the moment when a brief stops being a brief and starts being an idea. The MD doesn't impose anything on that process. It just accepts whatever ends up on its pages without complaint.

If you draw or letter, get the A5 in grid paper. The 5mm grid is light enough to ignore but present enough to anchor your lettering baselines. If you write more than you draw, get the lined. If you do neither, you probably don't need a notebook this good, but you'll buy one anyway.

The thing Yuri taught me about Japanese stationery

My Japanese teacher Yuri, who lives in Osaka, has a different relationship with this stuff than I do.

For her, a good pen and a good notebook aren't a discovery — they're the baseline. Japanese schoolchildren use quality stationery from age six. The Tombow brush pen I find thrillingly exotic is the thing she grew up using to practice kanji. The Pilot pen I recommend as a revelation is the pen in her pencil case.

What she finds interesting about the Western fascination with Japanese stationery is the way we contextualise it. We buy a Midori notebook and talk about the paper quality and the binding. She uses a Midori notebook and thinks about what she's going to write in it.

She has, however, suggested that most Western stationery lovers are buying the right things and using them wrong. Specifically: we keep them too pristine. A good Japanese notebook, she says, should be used hard — carried in a bag, opened flat, written in on trains. The MD gets better as it softens. The Tombow brush pen needs to be used enough that you stop thinking about it and start thinking about the letterform.

She's right. Use the good stationery. That's what it's for.

The three things worth buying

If you draw, letter, or want to start: this is the shelf I'd build first.

Pilot Juice gel pens — the metallic set for illustration and dark-paper lettering, the standard set for everyday drawing notes. Under £20. The most immediately useful purchase on this list.

Tombow Fudenosuke brush pens — twin tip, soft and hard. Learn the soft tip first. Under £5. There is no reason not to have these.

Midori MD notebook — A5, grid paper. Use it until it falls apart. Then notice that it doesn't fall apart.

These three things together cost less than a single Moleskine hardcover. They will outlast the Moleskine and make everything you write or draw in them feel more considered than it probably is. Japanese stationery has this effect. I warned you at the beginning. You have no excuse now.