Of notebooks and collecting stamps in Japan | LIFE

One of my early Christmas presents from my middle sister was a brown paper notebook filled with blank pages. And while we travelled around Japan I filled my notebook's pages with stamps of the places we visited. 

Train stations, Samurai houses, museums, castles, ryokans, tourists centres - Japan has an amazing array of public stamps to help document your trip! I'd highly recommend taking a blank notebook with you on your next trip to Japan and keeping an eye out for those stamps.

I might do a post that goes through my favourite stamps and what we did while we were in that area. (I think there's a few too many stamps to go through all of them!) I'm so glad that I have the stamps in my notebook as a memento from almost every region, landmark, and prefecture we visited. Though I know there's a few places I need to go back and visit because we had to miss out on adding a stamp to our notebooks because of time constraints (i.e. short shinkansen connections and not wanting to miss our trains!).

The beautiful porcelain pinch pots are from the Kouraku Kiln in Arita-Cho. They have treasure hunts in their warehouse where you can go through a pick up whatever you'd like from either the 5,000 yen or 10,000 yen sections, but it all needs to fit in the shopping basket provided! 

It's very easy to get swept away with all the gorgeous items in there, I know because we did! We got some beautiful stamps added to our notebooks while staying in Arita-Cho too, you can kind of see in them in the photo above. The stamp in black that's been cut off is from the local train station. It's of an artist at work with brush or a pen in hand, the other two are from the local pottery museum, Kyushu Ceramic Museum. 

There's also a multitude of stamps to buy/see in stationery shops throughout in Japan. Pretty much every mall I went into had a variety on sale from cute animals and holiday-themed stamps to work/school related stamps. I'd definitely recommend saving up if you've got a weakness for stationery! There were so many beautiful stationery/bookstores to see that I didn't have time to visit, I could have spent a week in Tokyo just checking out the different stationery stores and bookshops!

Catch you later,

x E