Back with Hobonichi and Tomoe for 2025

I just checked Gmail and my first Hobonichi Cousin A5 order was way back in 2016. I used Hobonichi as my diary for several years, but I stopped and moved to using straightforward A5 notebooks at some point. Why? I guess I felt I wasn’t using the Hobonichi format to its fullest. I don’t really use a ‘planner’ as such: the year views, month views, week views and schedule lines just didn’t do anything for me, so it felt like a waste having them. By the end of the year, I would only have written in about half of the pages in the book.

So I started to just pick up normal notebooks, date each page as I turned to it, and in the end I wrote my way through several A5 books of Tomoe, Cosmo, and other papers du jour, in notebooks from Elia Note, Seven Seas, Musubi, and others.

On 8th November I discovered that at some point I had ordered a 2025 Cousin, and there it was sat on my notebook pile, annoyingly empty. I had totally forgotten about it. I figured I might as well put it to some use before 2025 was fully out, so I stuck it into my Roterfaden and got started.

Oh, how I had been missing out!

It’s so nice reading the quotes at the bottom of the pages.

Enjoying the wide-opening spine. Seeing the monthly colour-coding. Using my needlepoint nibs to write inside the 3.7mm grid. Not having to date each page!

And Tomoe: despite the drama over the years, and the quality control issues that in particular have plagued Hobonichi, Tomoe is still by far my favourite paper. It’s not just the ink handling I like; I enjoy the crinkle, the light weight, the ghosting. This was the paper that made fountain pens click for me, and I still love it the best.

So I ordered a 2026 Hobonichi Cousin, the English version. (Hobonichi refers to its A5 notebooks as ‘Cousin’, they come in January or April start, and Japanese or English). A quick paper test suggests that all is well with this year’s batch. I am itching to get started with my daily journal entries, and I’m also hoping to use some of the other planner sections to track my no-buy 2026, weight loss and other new year aspirations.

But that’s not the end of my Hobonichi journey for this year. Back in 2018 I ordered a 5-year Hobonichi: a really cool concept where each page tracks the same day across five years.

As you use it over the years, you can look back at what your thoughts were over the previous times.

Alas I didn’t make the habit stick back then: I did about 18 months, and not very well.

But I still adore the idea, and I have picked up a new five-year Hobo starting in 2026. It goes all the way out to 2030, when my eldest daughter will turn 18, and life (I expect) will be very different.

I hope, hope, hope I can make it stick, and get into the groove of writing a paragraph to my future self. Enjoyably, the five-year Hobos come in Japanese only, so the daily quotations are utterly inscrutable to me.

Hobonichis are not just about the notebooks themselves: there’s a whole ecosystem of accessories around them, in particular, covers, and covers on covers (yes, covers to protect your cover). For my Cousin this year I picked up a cover by calligrapher Yuichi Inoue featuring the character ‘Jo’ (Going Up) in Japanese brushstroke. It’s striking, with a bright sky-blue liner. I love the positivity of the message, the contrast of the black and white graphics.

But honestly I will probably use my grey leather Roterfaden. It’s one purchase that I made in 2025 that really feels like me, and I appreciate it every day.

For the five-year, I was tempted to buy another cover but I have a beautiful Harris Tweed cover in cheerful orange that I bought from Etsy way back in the day.

Journalling is one of the daily practices I am most proud of. I am NOT a habit guy. I don’t stretch, work out, or stick to any good routine, despite the best intention. But I have made journalling into a habit that feels healthy, creative, and positive for me, and this is at least my tenth year doing it. Choosing Hobonichi again feels like coming home, in a way: I get to enjoy what in my opinion is easily the best planner out there, with the best paper, and indulge my weeb-like love of Japanese culture at the same time.

My daily diary is, in my brain, not about the future: it’s an act that is all about the present, the writing as catharsis for TODAY. I keep my old diaries, but I don’t expect to go back and read them one day. I write to get the day out of my head so I can sleep and move on to tomorrow, and I hold myself to the very lowest of standards: my journal entries are prosaic shit, boring, badly written, unstructured, repetitive, crass. That’s OK with me: I perform enough in my life that I don’t want to put pressure on myself when writing my fucking diary too!

But with the five-year Hobonichi, I hope I can bring a bit of that future self consciousness into my present day actions, too. Heaven knows I need that perspective.

One last note: this blog is about Deliberate Objects. Anyone who has used Hobonichi knows that this is a company that really, really takes journalling and planning seriously. These are beautifully crafted books, thoughtful, flexible, gorgeous — designed to be your life companion. I think I forgot about that when I moved away from Hobonichi, but it was only coming back to them that I realised how much I love all the little touches, from the packaging to the page layout: how the care and passion comes through. It makes a difference. It really does. I wish every company cared like Hobonichi does.