– courtesy of HobonichiOne of the more uplifting economic bubbles you’ll read about, a feature in the Japan Times catalogs how Americans are just silly for stationery.
Japanese artisan notebook and stationery providers have been more than happy to fulfill this export niche, and one company in particular has produced a diary/planner that has captivated American journalers. But first a short history.
As the Japanese economy boomed off of consumer electronics, stocks, cars, and cultural media in 1980s, every hardworking businessman had a ‘system techō.’ These day planners were about the size of a compact Bible, and anyone who was anyone owned and used one.
“It was said that a man who had a system techō could do his job well, and that a man who could do his job well had a system techō,” Kyo Kohinata told the Japan Times’ staff writer Thu-Huong Ha.
Kohinata is a writer for System Techo Style, a magazine on all things techō—which is in and of itself an indication of where this story is heading.
Eventually, the Blackberry and smartphones led to the near-extinction of the techō, but they have made an incredible renaissance, and in the same way Nintendo is a byword for the handheld gaming console, Hobonichi is a byword for the system techō.
Since 2001, Hobonichi has been making techōs with incredible attention to detail. Smudge-resistant pages protect fountain pen users from mistakes, precise page sizes are designed to accommodate precise numbers of A6 photographs, and gorgeous artistic covers quickly captivated the Japanese, and then American journaling markets.
The first English-language techō was sold in 2013, and sales quickly dwarfed domestic consumption. Millions of these sometimes charming, sometimes quirky, sometimes professional diaries, journals, and planners are shipped all around the world every year—now fueled by a social media community of journalers.
Hobonichi’s products have become a phenomenon unto themselves.
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The 2024 edition of the Hobonichi Techo came in 236 varieties and sold 900,000 units. This year’s edition comes at an extra optional cost with a guidebook featuring testimonies from 56 people on how they use their notebooks, strategies for organization, and more.
They come in 6 formats: monthly, weekly left side, weekly vertical, weekly horizontal, weekly blocked, and daily, and are sold in six different stationery sizes, including Bible, A5, and ‘Micro,” which is about the size of a business card.
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According to the Times, COVID-19 fueled the booming interest in artisan stationery even further. The combination of “non-essential” businesses being forced to close and being told to shelter in place made for fertile ground for venting frustrations into the crisp, white, newly cut pages of a brand new journal.
Even though those days are well behind us, for many the journaling trend stuck, and Hobonichi is just the tip of the spear of a variety of similar techō and stationery companies delighting Americans’ quiet hours with that famous and beloved attention to detail that makes Japanese products so renowned across the world.
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