>2015 Hobonichi Techo Thread<
Hobonichi Basics
Last year, I introduced the Hobonichi Techo as a "day planner," which I have come to regret. The Hobonichi Techo is better described as a "life book." "Day planner" sounds boring, whereas the term "life book" has the word "book" right in there, so it's the kind of thing that gets people HYPED.
Hobo Nikkan Itoi Shimbun is the media/notebook empire of none other than Mother/Earthbound creator Shigesato Itoi.
We don't really have a cultural equivalent of Mr. Itoi here in the States. He is most famous as a copy writer, which makes no sense, and has a widely followed daily blog featuring his upbeat, and charmingly weird, writings on a variety of topics. He created the Hobonichi Techo to be a flexible combination of planner and journal. It is the size of a small Japanese pocket-size novel (I guess this is a thing?) but, because of its ulta-thin, ultra-premium Tomoe River paper, it contains a full page for every day of the year.
[Usage examples taken from the AMAZING Hobonichi Love tumblr. This unofficial blog is run by the woman who translated the Hobonichi Planner into English. If you like the images, go to tumblr and reblog them and favorite them and give the creators props.]
So...why buy a weird Japanese notebook instead of using your stupid phone, having a blog, or buying a shitty 50 cent Mead notebook to signal to the world that you have no sense of self worth?
Well, for starters, it's a physical product that you can fill with physical things. Blogs and tweets and facebook have their uses (e.g. finding out how racist your family members are), but returning to physically writing and drawing and carrying around a sewn block of paper should not be so quickly dismissed as a dumb hipster affectation.
Unless we are talking about dumb hipsters. I hope the chains break on your penny farthing bicycles, hipsters!
But some of us just like our pens, pencils, and paper, the physical act of drawing and writing (I may have made a few threads about some of these things).
When people talk about Hobonichis, they mean the actual notebooks, but they are also referring to a specific style of recording things. The Hobonichi is perhaps most often used as a visual diary - people fill the pages with drawings, watercolor paintings, stamps, stickers, concert tickets, mementos from travels, diary entries...The Hobonichi is especially well suited to this mixed media style of use. This specific use is so associated with the Hobonchi Techo that other notebooks adapted for this use are referred to as "fauxbonichis."
You could obviously do all of this in an officially licensed Star Wars notebook from Target. Or, if you are a real hipsters, a dumb Moleskine notebook - the top choice of posers everywhere. So why shell out more for a Hobonichi Techo?
There's a fundamental issue here that comes up any time I write about pens, pencils, or paper, or really about any hobby on Earth. You can buy these things for pennies, and for many people, that works just fine. But think about any hobby you have - photography, cycling, working on your car, camping, PC gaming, whatever - you can do any of these things with the cheapest available gear. With some investment in nicer things, however, you can generally improve the experience considerably (there's obviously a tendency to go nuts and spend incredible sums of money for dramatically diminishing improvements, but if you don't go totally nuts, you can get a great return on a reasonable investment, yeah?).
The simple fact of the matter is that the Hobonichi Techo is a wonderful premium product, with a design that has obviously been carefully considered. The Tomoe River paper is some of the finest in the world. It is wonderfully smooth and pleasurable to write on. It is unusually thin AND unusually resistant to inks bleeding, spreading, or doing other undesirable things.
The paper is sewn so the book will lay flat. The book itself is very sturdy, but you can also buy wonderful cases that add storage pockets and additional protection. The whole thing is just a very pleasing thing to hold and use. I use it more because it is just so nice to write in!
You can now buy Hobonichi planners from authorized resellers in the US and UK!
(They sell out pretty fast, so sign up for notifications when they restock. They get shipments in every few weeks.)
Jetpens (US)
Planner: $31
Planner + Case: $47
free shipping on orders over $25
Pocketnotebooks (UK)
Planner: £25
There are a few brick and mortar stores that sell Hobonichi products, too. Here's a map where you can find any stores in your region. In the US, there are several places in California, as well as Seattle, Portland, Chicago, and New York. I'd call ahead to see what they stock!
The Hobonichi store has the widest selection of planners, cases, and accessories. The site is entirely in English, so no worries!
The biggest issue we had last year was that people did not know which cases they could use. The Hobonichi website is partly to blame here, as they list only pricier cases under the English language Techo.
The Hobonichi Techo "Original" (the name of the Japanese version) and the Hobonichi Planner (the name of the English language version) are the same size (A6). CASES FOR THE TECHO ORIGNAL AND HOBONICHI PLANNER ARE INTERCHANGEABLE.
The English Hobonichi techo is 2700 yen ($22US). The cheapest case is 1620 yen ($13US).
The larger Hobonichi Cousin is 3780 yen ($31US). The cheapest case is 2700 yen ($22US).
I went with the cheapest case both times. They are made of a sturdy nylon, feel really nice, have great pockets, and hold up really well. I've been super happy with them.
Shipping from Japan to the US is around 10-15 bucks. They ship surprisingly fast! The biggest holdup usually occurs in customs. One can only imagine that the customs officers take a little extra time to marvel at your good taste. Don't be surprised if you find a phone number from a sexy customs officer slipped into your package!
The package with the planner, not the other kind of...you get that idea.
I purchased a Cousin planner last year and switched to the English Hobonichi Planner for 2016. I could have reused my Cousin case had I stayed with the larger format, but I wanted something smaller and I also wanted to read the daily quotes. I'll tell you which I preferred at the end of 2016 so look forward to that.
The Cousin is European A5 size (half the size of a standard sheet of A4 paper. A4 is close to the size of standard US Letter paper. Folding the top down to the bottom gives an A5 sheet. A5 is the size of the larger Moleskine notebook. Does that help?) whereas the Hobonichi Planner or Techo Original is half as big, European A6. The Hobonichi Weeks format is a skinner version of the Planner or Original.
When deciding which Hobonichi to buy, consider the following:
Size
The Cousin gives you twice as much room to work with each day, and also includes a page with each week laid out in columns. The weekly pages are perfect for actual day planner stuff - the hours of the day make up the rows, so you can fill in your meetings and hot dates and court appearances.
Because the Cousin has additional pages and is a larger size, it is surprisingly heavy and non-pocket-sized. The Hobonichi Planner is size ADORABLE and is better suited for short daily entries and keeping in a bag, a coat pocket, or on a small pack animal like a kitten.
I think the Cousin would do a better job stopping a bullet, if you are journaling in a combat zone.
Note that the Japanese-language version are also available in the "avec" form. "Avec" is a French term that apparently means "we split it into two volumes."
Language
The Japanese-language Techo Original, Cousin, or Weeks (ONLY THE HOBONICHI PLANNER IS IN ENGLISH) are all perfectly usable if you do not speak Japanese. The months and days are marked with the same numbers you already know and love (example: 5). You do miss out on the days of the week (unless you memorize 7 Japanese words), the daily quotes (which are great - one of the reasons I switched), and a few additional pages in the back of the book about sushi, sake, the Japanese rail system - there are some fun little things in the back.
Cost
The Cousin costs about 10 bucks more. Additionally, if you are switching from one format to another and use a case, you need a new case, which also costs more.
Here are a few pictures from my Hobonichi Cousin (some are intentionally a little blurry so you don't read all of my AMAZING SECRETS!). My big artistic hobby is calligraphy, and I try to practice something on every page I use (and I go back to pages I did not use for more calligraphy space). Other than that, I just use different pens and inks as I change topics or as the mood strikes me. Without doing much sketching or taping in many pictures or anything like that, I think my entries end up looking more interesting than they would if I just wrote blocks of text in a notebook. It's easy to get intimidated by the examples Hobonichi Love reblogs, but you can find really simple ways to add visual interest to your Hobonichi even if you cannot paint or draw. Have fun!
Coming Soon!
I'll post about some alternatives to the Hobonichi, including some other nice general notebooks - Rhodia, Franklin-Christoph, Leuchtterm 1917, Seven Seas Writer - as well as the Midori Traveler's Notebook (which you can get with Tomoe River paper!).
I'll also post about some of the accessories you can buy from the Hobonichi website. I highly recommend the memo pad set (also available in A5). These pocket notebooks also have Tomoe River Paper, and are handy to slip into a pocket in your case.
Ask away if you have questions! And be sure to check out the 2015 thread for some usage examples from the GAF Hobonichi crew. We have quite a few Hobonichi users on GAF! I hope some of them will drop by and talk about how they used their Hobonichis over the course of the year!
Hobonichi Basics
Last year, I introduced the Hobonichi Techo as a "day planner," which I have come to regret. The Hobonichi Techo is better described as a "life book." "Day planner" sounds boring, whereas the term "life book" has the word "book" right in there, so it's the kind of thing that gets people HYPED.
Hobo Nikkan Itoi Shimbun is the media/notebook empire of none other than Mother/Earthbound creator Shigesato Itoi.
We don't really have a cultural equivalent of Mr. Itoi here in the States. He is most famous as a copy writer, which makes no sense, and has a widely followed daily blog featuring his upbeat, and charmingly weird, writings on a variety of topics. He created the Hobonichi Techo to be a flexible combination of planner and journal. It is the size of a small Japanese pocket-size novel (I guess this is a thing?) but, because of its ulta-thin, ultra-premium Tomoe River paper, it contains a full page for every day of the year.
[Usage examples taken from the AMAZING Hobonichi Love tumblr. This unofficial blog is run by the woman who translated the Hobonichi Planner into English. If you like the images, go to tumblr and reblog them and favorite them and give the creators props.]
So...why buy a weird Japanese notebook instead of using your stupid phone, having a blog, or buying a shitty 50 cent Mead notebook to signal to the world that you have no sense of self worth?
Well, for starters, it's a physical product that you can fill with physical things. Blogs and tweets and facebook have their uses (e.g. finding out how racist your family members are), but returning to physically writing and drawing and carrying around a sewn block of paper should not be so quickly dismissed as a dumb hipster affectation.
Unless we are talking about dumb hipsters. I hope the chains break on your penny farthing bicycles, hipsters!
But some of us just like our pens, pencils, and paper, the physical act of drawing and writing (I may have made a few threads about some of these things).
When people talk about Hobonichis, they mean the actual notebooks, but they are also referring to a specific style of recording things. The Hobonichi is perhaps most often used as a visual diary - people fill the pages with drawings, watercolor paintings, stamps, stickers, concert tickets, mementos from travels, diary entries...The Hobonichi is especially well suited to this mixed media style of use. This specific use is so associated with the Hobonchi Techo that other notebooks adapted for this use are referred to as "fauxbonichis."
You could obviously do all of this in an officially licensed Star Wars notebook from Target. Or, if you are a real hipsters, a dumb Moleskine notebook - the top choice of posers everywhere. So why shell out more for a Hobonichi Techo?
There's a fundamental issue here that comes up any time I write about pens, pencils, or paper, or really about any hobby on Earth. You can buy these things for pennies, and for many people, that works just fine. But think about any hobby you have - photography, cycling, working on your car, camping, PC gaming, whatever - you can do any of these things with the cheapest available gear. With some investment in nicer things, however, you can generally improve the experience considerably (there's obviously a tendency to go nuts and spend incredible sums of money for dramatically diminishing improvements, but if you don't go totally nuts, you can get a great return on a reasonable investment, yeah?).
The simple fact of the matter is that the Hobonichi Techo is a wonderful premium product, with a design that has obviously been carefully considered. The Tomoe River paper is some of the finest in the world. It is wonderfully smooth and pleasurable to write on. It is unusually thin AND unusually resistant to inks bleeding, spreading, or doing other undesirable things.
The paper is sewn so the book will lay flat. The book itself is very sturdy, but you can also buy wonderful cases that add storage pockets and additional protection. The whole thing is just a very pleasing thing to hold and use. I use it more because it is just so nice to write in!
You can now buy Hobonichi planners from authorized resellers in the US and UK!
(They sell out pretty fast, so sign up for notifications when they restock. They get shipments in every few weeks.)
Jetpens (US)
Planner: $31
Planner + Case: $47
free shipping on orders over $25
Pocketnotebooks (UK)
Planner: £25
There are a few brick and mortar stores that sell Hobonichi products, too. Here's a map where you can find any stores in your region. In the US, there are several places in California, as well as Seattle, Portland, Chicago, and New York. I'd call ahead to see what they stock!
The Hobonichi store has the widest selection of planners, cases, and accessories. The site is entirely in English, so no worries!
The biggest issue we had last year was that people did not know which cases they could use. The Hobonichi website is partly to blame here, as they list only pricier cases under the English language Techo.
The Hobonichi Techo "Original" (the name of the Japanese version) and the Hobonichi Planner (the name of the English language version) are the same size (A6). CASES FOR THE TECHO ORIGNAL AND HOBONICHI PLANNER ARE INTERCHANGEABLE.
The English Hobonichi techo is 2700 yen ($22US). The cheapest case is 1620 yen ($13US).
The larger Hobonichi Cousin is 3780 yen ($31US). The cheapest case is 2700 yen ($22US).
I went with the cheapest case both times. They are made of a sturdy nylon, feel really nice, have great pockets, and hold up really well. I've been super happy with them.
Shipping from Japan to the US is around 10-15 bucks. They ship surprisingly fast! The biggest holdup usually occurs in customs. One can only imagine that the customs officers take a little extra time to marvel at your good taste. Don't be surprised if you find a phone number from a sexy customs officer slipped into your package!
The package with the planner, not the other kind of...you get that idea.
I purchased a Cousin planner last year and switched to the English Hobonichi Planner for 2016. I could have reused my Cousin case had I stayed with the larger format, but I wanted something smaller and I also wanted to read the daily quotes. I'll tell you which I preferred at the end of 2016 so look forward to that.
The Cousin is European A5 size (half the size of a standard sheet of A4 paper. A4 is close to the size of standard US Letter paper. Folding the top down to the bottom gives an A5 sheet. A5 is the size of the larger Moleskine notebook. Does that help?) whereas the Hobonichi Planner or Techo Original is half as big, European A6. The Hobonichi Weeks format is a skinner version of the Planner or Original.
When deciding which Hobonichi to buy, consider the following:
Size
The Cousin gives you twice as much room to work with each day, and also includes a page with each week laid out in columns. The weekly pages are perfect for actual day planner stuff - the hours of the day make up the rows, so you can fill in your meetings and hot dates and court appearances.
Because the Cousin has additional pages and is a larger size, it is surprisingly heavy and non-pocket-sized. The Hobonichi Planner is size ADORABLE and is better suited for short daily entries and keeping in a bag, a coat pocket, or on a small pack animal like a kitten.
I think the Cousin would do a better job stopping a bullet, if you are journaling in a combat zone.
Note that the Japanese-language version are also available in the "avec" form. "Avec" is a French term that apparently means "we split it into two volumes."
Language
The Japanese-language Techo Original, Cousin, or Weeks (ONLY THE HOBONICHI PLANNER IS IN ENGLISH) are all perfectly usable if you do not speak Japanese. The months and days are marked with the same numbers you already know and love (example: 5). You do miss out on the days of the week (unless you memorize 7 Japanese words), the daily quotes (which are great - one of the reasons I switched), and a few additional pages in the back of the book about sushi, sake, the Japanese rail system - there are some fun little things in the back.
Cost
The Cousin costs about 10 bucks more. Additionally, if you are switching from one format to another and use a case, you need a new case, which also costs more.
Here are a few pictures from my Hobonichi Cousin (some are intentionally a little blurry so you don't read all of my AMAZING SECRETS!). My big artistic hobby is calligraphy, and I try to practice something on every page I use (and I go back to pages I did not use for more calligraphy space). Other than that, I just use different pens and inks as I change topics or as the mood strikes me. Without doing much sketching or taping in many pictures or anything like that, I think my entries end up looking more interesting than they would if I just wrote blocks of text in a notebook. It's easy to get intimidated by the examples Hobonichi Love reblogs, but you can find really simple ways to add visual interest to your Hobonichi even if you cannot paint or draw. Have fun!
Coming Soon!
I'll post about some alternatives to the Hobonichi, including some other nice general notebooks - Rhodia, Franklin-Christoph, Leuchtterm 1917, Seven Seas Writer - as well as the Midori Traveler's Notebook (which you can get with Tomoe River paper!).
I'll also post about some of the accessories you can buy from the Hobonichi website. I highly recommend the memo pad set (also available in A5). These pocket notebooks also have Tomoe River Paper, and are handy to slip into a pocket in your case.
Ask away if you have questions! And be sure to check out the 2015 thread for some usage examples from the GAF Hobonichi crew. We have quite a few Hobonichi users on GAF! I hope some of them will drop by and talk about how they used their Hobonichis over the course of the year!
looking forward to starting a new one!