My Favorite Stationery: Manuscript Paper That Makes You Feel Like a Writer

This post was automatically translated by AI from the Japanese original. Some photos show Japanese text.

My favorite stationery lately is manuscript paper, which lets me feel like a bit of a writer.

Usually I type my writing into the notes app on my computer or phone, so I don’t really need report paper or manuscript paper.

But in a stationery magazine, I saw someone who put manuscript paper in a system planner and used it as a notepad, and I got excited about how stylish that was. (Manuscript paper, or genkō yōshi, is Japanese writing paper printed with a grid of squares, one character per square.)

It also seems like it would be fun to put my diary into those square frames.

I normally use A5 notebooks, so I’d been looking for manuscript paper in a size I could stick into a notebook.

Then I found Masuya’s futokoro writing pad (Masuya is a Japanese stationery maker).
It’s A5 size with 200 squares per page.

When I turned the cover, the grid was fainter than I’d imagined, and at first I thought, “Huh? Is this a printing mistake?”

It turns out they deliberately print it on the back of the sheet, so that you write over a faintly showing-through grid.

How interesting!

The first half is in dark blue, and the second half in dark brown.

The grid I used in elementary school was much lighter, a kind of ochre color.
It reminded me of a composition homework where I imitated I Am a Cat and wrote about my day as if I were a cat.

I remember filling in the squares as much as I could, revising with double lines and speech bubbles, and then copying it all out neatly again.
I felt such a sense of accomplishment for everything I wrote with my hands getting dirty.

Touching manuscript paper again as an adult feels like a real luxury.

When I try to write something, I think:

I have to write neatly.
I have to write something good.
It’s all about keeping up appearances. Haha.

It writes nicely with a fountain pen, too.
I fully enjoyed the pleasure of writing characters by hand.

It would be fun to write an essay or a novel on this paper.