A fascinating article from the BBC about Japan’s traditions around the use of paper. Towards the end, there is a mention of the popularity of using planners such as the Hobonichi Techo:

There are also still strong advocates for paper’s analogue charm in a world that is becoming increasingly digital. Japan’s so-called “techo culture” celebrates the pleasure of organising and documenting ones life in a planner, or techo. Few companies represent the culture better than Hobonichi, whose techos have developed a cult-like following.

That’s thanks to their obsessive attention to detail and some clever design features. The spacing between lines has been tweaked by fractions of a millimetre several times and the planners include a full page for every day of the year. Ensuring a book with more than 400 pages was slim enough to fit in a pocket even forced them to source the perfect paper from Tomoe River, which makes speciality papers for industry.

Customers use the techos for all kinds of reasons, the company says, from planning to journaling to documenting hobbies, but they are also miniature pieces of art and a revealing window into the inner lives of their authors. There’s a growing trend for people to share their beautifully constructed techo pages on Instagram, a vision of paper and digital technology merging.

But in a world where so many aspects of our lives are mediated by our smartphones the techos also provide a more concrete record of our lives, says Yuri Kimura, who like most of Hobonichi’s staff is an avid user. “As long as our life is offline, we need this,” she says. That’s a trend that’s shared with people all over the world as seen in the rise of the hugely popular pen-and-paper organisation system of bullet journals.

Read the full article at Why Japan is Obsessed with Paper