Cute stationery

Last week we enjoyed a day out at the Japanese department store where we had some delish ramen and browsed the bookstore which was filled with lots of fun stuff for people who like stationery. Everything in a Japanese stationery store is cute! It was our first time there - they had lots of origami paper, cute cute cute little stationery items, lots of nice pens, notebooks/composition books that are ruled/lined for writing in Japanese, trinkets, cool Japanese magazines. Many of the Japanese magazines came with swag - here, all I ever see packaged with magazines are CDs or DVDs. They had cool tote bags, purse/bags and more in the women's fashion and beauty mags. The kids magazines came with various toys - kind of like our Happy Meals do, but with better stuff.

I've never picked up a graphic novel, but they had tons of them there - big thick books full of anime/manga. There was a group of non-Asian (read: white) teens there admiring the manga titles - apparently they were longtime fans. Being that the novels were in Japanese, I had to ask them if they were able to read Japanese. The anwer...was no. Apparently you can get the gist of the story simply by looking at the pictures...no reading necessary! :) I thought that was amusing.

I bought a super cute Japanese Hello Kitty diary (agenda/planner) which I'll take a pic of and share. I also got a couple of folders (for lack of a better word) that have cute graphics on them...oh! and a cute pencil case that I gave to my daughter.