Come the end of the year in Japan, there’s a rush on cleaning services, straw decorations and boxed osechi ryōri (traditional New Year’s cuisine). But over the past few years, a new item has joined Japan’s January prep lineup: planners.
Japan has a globally renowned stationery industry, with niche items you never knew you needed, like “memorization pens” that make it easier to study and highlighters that leave rulers ink-free. In that spirit, Japan’s decades-old take on the paper planner has now gone mainstream and is spreading quickly across the world.
The techō notebook combines the words for “hand” and “account book,” and its most popular version is the “Bible size,” at 17 by 9.5 centimeters, just about the dimensions of a compact Bible. Broadly speaking there are two kinds: the toji techō, whose pages are fixed, and the shisutemu (system) techō, which is customizable.
The thick, black leather-bound time management scheduler was once a symbol of the 1980s bubble era salaryman.
“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,” says Kyo Kohinata, writer for System Techo Style, a yearly magazine spun off from stationery magazine Shumi no Bungubako, where Kohinata has been writing for more than 15 years. But by the 2000s, the system techō had become a relic, something only carried by old fogeys, perhaps akin to a Filofax or a Blackberry.
But the great planner renaissance was yet to come.
Shigesato Itoi is a copywriter who once captured the heart of Japan’s creative class, collaborating with everyone from Nintendo to Haruki Murakami, and even voicing the father in “My Neighbor Totoro.” In 1998, he launched a site called Hobonichi Itoi Shimbun, or “Almost Daily Ito Newspaper,” where he posted essays, interviews and product recommendations.
The site was also used to sell products. Itoi wanted to make a notebook that he could carry around and take notes in, like he did with paperback novels (which in Japan are often pocket-size). In October 2001, Hobonichi introduced a planner with pockets for storage and super-thin, non-smudging Tomoe River paper and quotes at the bottom. Its signature feature was one blank memo page for each day of the calendar year. Hobonichi sold 12,000 copies of its 2002 edition, and the next year it introduced four new color options for the cover.
The 2024 edition of the Hobonichi Techo came in 236 varieties and sold 900,000 units. For 2025, the company is also selling a 159-page guidebook, with testimonies from 56 people on how they use their notebooks and tips down to the exact 7-Eleven printer settings needed to fit 20 photos onto an A6 monthly calendar page.
No longer the sedate sign of a productive businessman, the techō has become a fashion item beloved by hobbyists. And rather than a work tool used for meetings and reminders, it’s now just as commonly used as a record of memories and a means of self expression.
On a weekend afternoon in December at Shinjuku’s Tokyu Hands department store, people of all ages and genders roamed the sprawling planner section. A sign instructed shoppers on six basic formats — monthly, weekly left side, weekly vertical, weekly horizontal, weekly blocked and daily. These are sold in at least six slightly different paper sizes, including A5 and Bible, the smallest of which is M5, which stands for “micro 5” and is a hair bigger than the size of a business card.
The variability of styles means that people can switch their notebooks for seasons, moods and purposes, and use multiple at once rather than having to lug around one massive techō as they did before.
“Carrying a heavy system techō around wedged in your armpit like a rugby ball — people got tired!” says Kohinata.
Though the paper planner boom might seem like a feel-good story of the return of ye olde timey coziness, it’s very much a product of the social media age.
Journaling communities thrive on YouTube and Instagram, where everyday doodlers and power users alike post and seek validation on their detailed notes, painstaking stickering and inventive organization systems.
“There are people who say they might not write in their diaries if they didn’t have social media to post them on,” says Kohinata.
Rabid fans do a lot of heavy lifting for the stationery companies — and largely for free. Hobonichi says they’ve done very little by way of promotion, advertising or paid referrals; the considerable growth of the company’s techō has been through user-born social media and word of mouth.
That’s true even in the United States, where social media feeds are flooded with influencers paid to push sketchy products. In recent years, the American journaling community, which once brought bullet journaling to the world, has caught wind of Hobonichi and other Japanese techō, including the Traveler’s Notebook, a slim freeform notebook originally meant for documenting trips. The U.S. community is now spreading the good word of the Bible-size notebooks, touting their attention to detail, high-quality paper and general cuteness.
Hobonichi offered its first English-language techō in 2013 and its first Chinese one in 2019. The 2024 edition was the first time that overseas sales exceeded domestic sales.
The current techō boom also has COVID-19 to thank. In the dark days of the early years of the pandemic, sad, sick and stuck inside, people sought refuge in the quasi-meditative act of writing down their feelings by hand.
Even though the urgency of that worldwide depression has largely dissipated, people show no signs of slowing their scribbles. Southern Californian creative Eunice Roe, who shares her fountain pen handwritten notes with nearly 52,000 followers on Instagram, says the act of writing itself is “very healing,” and that journaling helps her manage her stress and emotions and keep track of new ideas.
“My planner keeps the flow of my life going,” she says.
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