I went to Tokyo to look at knives, but ended up with notebooks. In other words, it was a typical trip to Tokyo for me.

The morning started with the Ginza Blade Show which is relatively small, but was crowded and hot. Fortunately for my pocketbook, there wasn’t anything there I couldn’t live without and after taking some video and a few pictures, I ran away.

The next stop was ItoYa which, to my mind, isn’t as cool as it used to be, but is always worth at least a short trip.

That was followed by the search for a pen shop I hadn’t been to before. I found it surprisingly quickly. Unfortunately, it decided to close today so all I could do was stare longingly at the locked door.

After that, I made an excursion to Maruzen to hunt for ink and pens. The pen was sold out, as were the flavors of ink I was looking for.

From there I went down to the Mitsukoshi main store to verify the dates for their annual fountain pen festival. (March 15-20th, if anyone happens to be in town.) The clerks were friendly and quickly gave me the information. The Mitsukoshi stationery section is small but in a nice location near Mitsukoshi’s famous atrium. It also has three different sets of modern pens available to try. I played the Platinum nibs and the Pilot nibs and convinced myself NOT to buy a Falcon nib for one of my pens. Before I changed my mind, I wandered over to the notebook section.

Unfortunately, although it is small, the stationery section had some notebooks I’ve been looking for. I now own them, which partly breaks one of my Pen and Stationery resolutions as I forgot to do push-ups in the store before I bought them.

After that, I came home. All in all, for trip to Tokyo, it wasn’t that hard on my wallet. I’ll be back down there in two weeks, though, for the Tokyo Folding Knife Show.