Choosing a Japanese Planner: Size, Weekly Page, Memo Space

Before you compare brands, three things are worth settling: how big the book is, whether it has a weekly page at all, and how much blank memo paper it carries. This page goes through each, then covers when Japanese planners are actually on sale and which ones come in English.

Those three are not my theory. I choose planners and gifts for corporate buyers in Japan, and they are the three changes that draw objections when a company alters the planner it hands out.

I live in Japan and read Japanese. I work in the Japanese stationery and corporate-gift trade; no maker named on this page is a client of mine, and I do not use my employer or its products as a source or an example. I have not tested the planners named here. Two kinds of material follow and I have kept them apart: what I see in that work, and what makers publish. How this site works.

Where the three come from

In Japan, companies give planners to the people they do business with, and the time they want to hand them over is, more often than not, November, on the round of year-end visits. A planner with a company name on it has to be ordered in August, and before Obon, the mid-August holiday, is best. So the first things that knock a candidate out in my work are whether it can take a name imprint, and whether it can arrive in time.

After that, the priority is continuity. Most of these planners go to the same recipients every year, so the question is whether the people already receiving one will dislike a change. Companies mostly do not want to alter the layout or the way the book works very much. The changes that are disliked are:

• whether there is a weekly page
• the number of memo pages
• the size

A limit on how far this carries. These are reactions from people who were given a planner, not people who chose one, and most of them had been given one before. You are choosing for yourself. I am not offering the list as a ranking. I am offering it as three things that recipients turned out to care about, and all three can be decided before you look at a single brand.

Size

What I see: requests for a larger size are common, and in most cases the larger planner is the one people go on using for a long time. That is an observation about people who were given their planner. I do not know where they keep them or how they carry them, and it is not a study.

What a maker says: Takahashi Shoten, one of the large Japanese planner publishers, has a Japanese-language guide for first-time users. It describes the familiar failure — it did not last, and the second half of the year is blank pages — and asks whether the cause is not having the planner with you when you want to write. Its advice goes by what you carry:

(Read 19 September 2026. I did not find an English version of this guide; the publisher's homepage carried no English link on that date.)

Takahashi's test is where the book will be when you want to write in it. What I can add is only which size I have seen people keep using. For a planner that stays at home or at the office, Takahashi's own table allows any size and recommends the larger ones as well.

For scale, the size menu on Takahashi's site gives A6 as 148×105, B6 as 182×128 and A5 as 210×148, in millimetres. Hobonichi's type guide, which is in English, sorts its books by the same sizes. Under "Pick by size" it describes A6 as "This compact size fits nicely into your hand" and lists the Original there, and A5 as "This large size provides lots of space to write and paste into your pages" and lists the Cousin.

A weekly page, or not

The second decision is whether you want a weekly spread at all, or a monthly calendar with notes.

Takahashi sorts its planners by layout, and the Japanese names do not match the English ones. Its guide pairs five of them with a kind of user (its layout index lists more):

Of the left type, Takahashi's index says only that schedule and memo can both be written in the same spread. Hobonichi describes its Weeks book, in its own English, like this: "The left page provides space to write in your plans for the week, while the right has blank graph notebook paper." I put the two side by side because they read alike to me; Takahashi's index does not say which page holds what, and I have not compared the books. Hobonichi's Original and Cousin are one page per day.

What I suggest for managing work: monthly plus weekly-left, in A5. The monthly pages are the calendar, where work, private life and family plans can be managed in one wide view. The weekly pages I suggest using as a journal: what you thought each day, and a log of how you felt.

For other uses I have nothing from my own work to offer, so here is what the makers say. For keeping a journal, Hobonichi's guide points to the Original: "By writing what you did each day while reflecting on your feelings, you can organize your thoughts through journaling." For a first Hobonichi it asks "Why not start with the classic Original?" Takahashi's suggestion for a daily record or short diary is the separate type.

Memo space

In my work, a request to add memo pages is one that comes back from users in some cases, and the number of memo pages is one of the three things recipients dislike having changed.

Makers treat it as a feature to choose on. In Hobonichi's English guide the Weeks Mega is the Weeks with "Lots of memo pages", and the Day-Free pairs a monthly calendar with "171 graph paper pages". One way to decide comes from a user Takahashi quotes in its guide, an office worker in his thirties who moved his schedule to a digital calendar, found carrying a separate work notebook a nuisance, and switched to a one-page-per-day planner so that meeting notes and ideas live in one book. If you would otherwise carry a notebook alongside the planner, that is the case for choosing on memo space first.

If you do not read Japanese

Hobonichi's guide lists one book as "An English-language techo with an unobtrusive and supportive layout": the Planner, A6, one page per day. That is the maker's description, not my assessment; I have not handled one. For Takahashi I checked only the publisher's homepage, which carried no English link on 19 September 2026; I have not searched its catalogue for English editions.

When to buy

Japanese planners are seasonal stock. Takahashi's guide says so directly: you might think they are on sale whenever you want one, but planners have a selling period.

Takahashi's notice for the 2027 range gave 1 September 2026 as the release date for January-start editions. Its guide calls January start the largest share of the market, and recommends April start to people who reset with the Japanese fiscal and school year. It says some shops carry 4,000 to 5,000 kinds or more, and advises buying in the period when many are on sale.

Going by those dates, September and October are inside the window and close to its start. Getting a planner from Japan to your address is a separate question, and how to buy from Japan covers the routes and what each does to the price.