A Guide to Tokyo Stationery
Where to go, what to ignore, and what to buy twice.
Tokyo is not the best city in the world for stationery because it has the best shops. It is the best because the ordinary floor of an ordinary department store in an ordinary suburb carries forty kinds of mechanical pencil lead, sorted by hardness and diameter, and somebody has thought about the packaging of each one. The specialist shops are a consequence of that baseline, not the cause of it. We go twice a year, we come back with about eleven kilos, and roughly a third of it is bought within two hundred metres of a station we were passing through anyway. What follows is where we actually go, in the order we go there. The eleven kilos is not an exaggeration and it is not all for the shop. Roughly two kilos of it is paper we will use ourselves and never sell, because the mill will not quote for a run our size.
Itoya on Ginza has been selling stationery since 1904, now occupies twelve floors plus an annexe, and is both essential and slightly a trap. Floors one to three are gift-wrapped and crowded and you can skip them entirely. The good floors are the seventh — writing paper, sold as single sheets so you can compare — and the annexe behind, where the professional supplies live: drafting tape, bone folders, twenty weights of tracing paper, a wall of Japanese envelope sizes with no English on it at all. Staff will let you write with anything in the building. Ask, and someone will bring a pad of the paper and a chair. Go on a weekday before eleven; by Saturday afternoon the lifts are unusable. There is a paper museum on the top floor that nobody visits, and a room where they will match a colour of ink to a swatch you bring in, which takes about a fortnight and is posted on.
Kakimori is in Kuramae, twenty minutes east, in a neighbourhood of leather workshops and coffee roasters that Tokyo has started calling its Brooklyn and should stop. You choose a cover, then the paper — about a dozen stocks, laid out to be touched — then the rings and the closure, and they bind it in front of you in roughly fifteen minutes. A notebook comes to around 3,500 yen. Next door is Inkstand, where you blend your own ink from pigment bases: you sit at a bench with pipettes and a chart, mix, test on a card, adjust, and leave with thirty-five millilitres in a labelled bottle for about 2,500 yen. It takes an hour and you must book ahead. It is the best thing we have done in Tokyo that did not involve eating. Kuramae is also where the Kakimori people send you next, which is a leather workshop two streets away that will punch and rivet a cover while you wait. Nobody there speaks English and it does not matter in the slightest.
Traveler’s Factory in Nakameguro is a small shop above the river that exists to serve one product — a leather cover, a rubber band and some paper refills — which has acquired an alarming international following. Ignore the following. The refills are excellent and cheap, the shop carries limited papers you will not find elsewhere, and there is a table of about thirty rubber stamps you may use for nothing. Sekaido in Shinjuku is the opposite proposition: five floors, ruthless discounting, fluorescent light, no romance whatsoever, and the best prices in the city. If you only have one afternoon, go to Sekaido and buy in quantity. Ask for the discount card at the ground-floor till on your first visit. It takes two minutes, works on almost everything, and pays for itself before you have left the third floor.
The cheap end is where Japan genuinely wins. Loft and Tokyu Hands both run a full stationery floor and both discount properly in January. Any large convenience store sells Zebra and Pilot pens at 120 yen that outperform anything at four times the price in Delhi. And the hundred-yen shops are not a joke: Seria in particular carries kraft envelopes, index cards and washi tape that we have bought in quantity and resold, and the only reason we do not carry more is that the packaging is entirely in Japanese and the barcodes do not resolve in our system. Seria is the one to go to. Daiso is bigger and worse. The one thing to check is glue. Hundred-yen envelopes and tape are excellent; hundred-yen adhesive is not, and will let go in a Delhi summer within about six weeks.
A note on paper, because it is the whole argument. Tomoe River is 52 gsm, almost transparent, and takes a wet fountain pen without bleeding, which should not be physically possible; the mill changed hands in 2022 and the new stock behaves slightly differently, a fact the internet has not recovered from. Midori MD is the sensible everyday choice — cream, 80 gsm, deliberately unbranded on the cover because the founder thought a notebook should be anonymous. Kokuyo Campus is what everybody actually uses and costs 180 yen. Our own grid notebook is letterpressed on a cotton-blend stock that is none of these, from a mill in Ehime, and we are on our fourth reorder. The mill runs the letterpress stock twice a year and will not run it otherwise, so our reorder cycle is set by a machine in Ehime rather than by anything happening in our warehouse.
What to buy twice: the Uni Kuru Toga, because you will lose one. Kokuyo notebooks by the pack, because they are 180 yen and you will regret rationing them. Ink cartridges in the colour you like, because the colour you like will be discontinued. Bone folders, because they vanish. And the small brass Traveler’s Company pen, which is unlacquered, ages to brown, and is the closest thing we have found to an object we would have made ourselves. What not to buy: anything sold in a set of six with a ribbon round it, anything at the airport, and the fountain pen you are about to buy on the last afternoon because the trip is ending. That one never gets used. Weigh your case before you leave the hotel. Paper is the heaviest thing you will ever buy per unit of enthusiasm, and every trip we have made has ended with a small pile abandoned on a bed.
