It is September, and I am about to click Confirm Order on a Hobonichi agenda for 2023, four ridiculous months in advance. I’d like to credit this event to impeccable organizational skills but alas, that would be a lie; in truth, I’ve succumbed to the allure of Japanese stationery.
The story of this love affair begins when I was planning to visit Berlin for the first time and was up late Googling authentic souvenirs when I was provided the suggestion of buying a fountain pen.
A fountain pen? I liked odd things, yes, but I couldn’t exactly see myself dipping a quill into an inkwell that I would inevitably end up spilling onto myself. I didn’t even own a powdered wig! But I dug a bit further and learned that while these pens certainly evoked the past, they were more 1980s than 1780s - all bold colours and geometric shapes.
I did not end up buying one on my trip, as I feared encountering the dreaded Berliner Schnauze while attempting to enter into this new realm, concluding that this transaction would best be left conducted in my own city and in my native language. And so this fruitful relationship began on a summer outing to what has come to be my beloved local purveyor of fine stationery goods.
“But Emily!” I can hear you cry out, “This letter is titled On Japanese Stationery. You’ve got your nations mixed up.” Well, as luck would have it, while my first fountain pen purchase was a blue German Lamy Safari, I would soon discover that that other great nation known for above-par engineering and subpar world war performances was the real power house of all things writing. And why wouldn’t they be? A culture that exemplifies the successful marriage of the ancient and the modern, Japan’s stationery industry is a wonderland of covetable goods, and my collection soon surpassed pens to include writing paper, notebooks, envelopes, pencils, stickers, and washi tape with little ojisan on it.
The popularity of all things analog tends to get a bad rap; it can be faddish and snobby. Record player? Pfft, I only listen to my records on a gramophone! But while it’s fun to laugh at the hipster winding up the Victrola in their parlour room, setting insufferable personalities aside, there is much to enjoy and appreciate in the analog.
For most of my life, the concept of writing supplies invoked the back-to-school aisle at Walmart, with stacks of Hilroy paper beaming the reflection of the fluorescent lights into my retinas and thousands of Bic pens filled with their waxy, uneven ink. It was the land of the sterile, boring, and disposable.
Instead, I was seduced by a world in which there exists an endless selection of exquisite paper, from the thick and creamy to the biblically thin. The incessant hum of clattering keyboards is silenced, and you sit like an ancient scribe accompanied by the friction of the nib against a page that drinks up the ink so efficiently there’s no whisper of feathering or bleeding. Your handwriting may be terrible, and you need to learn to loosen the vice grip that renders your writing hand a writing claw, but there is such satisfaction in writing a pen dry and filling it up again instead of tossing it away.
And there exists every colour of ink imaginable, for every mood, every flight of fancy, from screaming hot pink to a pale grey that requires bionic vision to read, but the ones that evoke the romantic in you are the ancient browns thick like tea that has tipped from steeped to stewed.
And oh, the handmade leather goods, there to carry your treasures and cradle your words, that develop a patina that only the magical confluence of time, light, oils and oxygen can produce. The leather notebook in your pocket a reminder that there is a world around you to observe and be recorded.
Time rears its head and reminds you of its supreme place in the world - waiting, for the ink to dry so that you do not smear your words across the page and into illegible oblivion; waiting, for the letter in the post to reach its destination, no Sent folder to check or Read Receipt option to set. The pace of life slows and you have a companion that remains at your side, even if they lie fallow and neglected for stretches of time, awaiting pen to fall to page once again.
Thanks for reading.
Your writing is delightful!:)