I can’t decide whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing that there is no Daiso store near me. For those who aren’t familiar with it, Daiso is a chain of Japanese dollar stores, with worldwide locations including quite a few in California. There are also US locations in Texas and Washington state. The stores are full of fun stationery, beauty, and houseware items and everything is dirt cheap. It is so cheap that their online store doesn’t even attempt to sell individual items– everything is in 6 packs or 12 packs or 20 packs just to get to the $15-25 price point where it even makes sense to ship things. When I went to their store in Alameda, CA, I was determined not to go nuts buying all sorts of doodads, but I couldn’t escape without a pack of post-it notes, some mechanical pencils, 2 packs of paintbrushes, and the Daiso notebook in this review. My total bill was $10.58, of which this notebook accounted for $1.59, I think? Maybe $1.99? Definitely under $2.

So, what would you expect to find in a hardcover, pocket size, under-$2 Moleskine clone notebook? Let’s take a look!

Daiso Notebook Exterior

The outside of the notebook is very typical of Moleskine clones. The cover material has a texture pretty much identical to Moleskine’s. What looks different is the vertical placement of the paper band with the branding. There is no branding stamped anywhere on the notebook itself.

The Daiso notebook is also noticeably thinner. I’m always saying I like chunky, thicker notebooks, but I actually like the slimness of this. The construction is quite good, though I seem to remember picking through the ones on the shelf to find one that was nicely square and even. The cover overhang is pretty big, though, and the corners are folded in with only a few pleats, which always makes the corners look a little angled and clunky.

There is an elastic closure and it has just the right tension to sit easily around the whole notebook, or tucked out of the way just around the back cover without flopping loosely. My biggest question about the exterior is why the paper band has the word “flipchart” on it. I could not detect anything flipcharty about this notebook.

Daiso Notebook Interior

Inside, you get plain white endpapers, without any back pocket. There is a ribbon marker which is very skinny, like the ones found on Nolty and Design Y notebooks rather than the wider ribbons found on most other brands.

The five sewn signatures allow the notebook to open flat. The 80 sheets (or 160 pages) of paper are lined, with wide margins and the sides and space at the top and bottom. The paper is a creamy off-white, similar to Moleskine, but feels noticeably less smooth to the touch.

Daiso Notebook Pen Tests

With pens and pencils, you also notice the slight tooth of the paper. I’m guessing that the paper weight may be 80 GSM because that number appears among some Japanese characters on the cover, and the page count is already specified elsewhere. When I first started writing with fountain pens, I was feeling a little more feedback from the paper than I prefer, and I expected to see a lot of feathering and bleed-through. But the paper actually performed better than I thought it would. There was not much noticeable feathering, and bleed-through was limited to a few of my wettest pens. Show-through is average. I would not consider this a slam dunk for fountain pen users, but depending on your personal preferences for paper feel and pen/ink types, it could work. Let’s call it semi-fountain-pen-friendly.

Conclusion

This notebook cost less than $2, people! It’s an insanely good value for a notebook of this format. It may not be quite as refined as some of the competition, but the competition usually costs 7-10X more. It is made in China, but so is most of the competition. I can’t think of any other cheap (under $10) Moleskine clone type notebooks I’ve reviewed that are as good a value as the Daiso notebook– there was the Tops notebook that cost around $5 back in 2010, but I pretty much hated it. The Peninsula notebook I got for about $6 or $7 was just so-so. The Superior Maker notebook is probably the best “cheap” Moleskine alternative I’ve reviewed, but it costs about $9 for the pocket size. If you are on a tight budget and go through a lot of notebooks or if you have kids and don’t want to spend a lot of money on fancy journals for them, Daiso is a great option– if you live near a store. Unfortunately these notebooks don’t seem to be listed on their online store,** though they do have some other fun notebooks, stationery and art supplies if you are willing to buy in bulk quantities.

[**UPDATED: thanks to a Facebook follower who is obviously smarter than I am, I now have a link to buy these on the Daiso online store. 15 notebooks for $25.50! Thanks Carsten! And in searching again, I found some other multi-packs of Daiso pocket notebooks sold online: red/orange/yellow colored versions of this notebook, as well as versions with faux wood covers and faux marble covers— these last two seem like they might have the word “journal” embossed on the cover, though.]