Fountain Pen Day 2023 in Japan loot.jpg

Before I left for this trip, I said I would not be buying:

• paper products, because paper is dense/heavy, and between my wife and me we only have checked baggage allowance for a single up-to-20kg item;
• ink, because I don't want to risk transporting such in our suitcase in case it leaks or gets broken in transit, which means I have to put it all in my personal up-to-7kg carry-on item (and the carrier Jetstar is notorious for weighing everyone's carry-on at the boarding gate, in order to maximise revenue from forcing passengers to pay an "upgrade" fee on the spot for any excess weight); and
• pens, because I would have bought just about everything I want from Japan (sold and shipped by Amazon Japan) via Amazon.com.au before the trip, and I probably won't have any "budget" left by now. 

I disregarded all of that today, even though we have yet to go to the Tokyo International Pen Show. This isn't the first of my being unfaithful to each sub-clause of my pledge on this trip either.

The Pilot Grance fountain pen and pack of Sakae TP iroful paper were ordered on Amazon.co.jp just after 2:30AM, and delivered to my hotel by 6PM "free", on account of the ("trial") Prime membership Amazon Japan kept pestering me to sign up for -- even though I was a paying Prime member of Amazon Japan years ago.

I've never seen a Platinum-branded (as opposed to, say, a MUJI-rebranded) Preppy in opaque white, either "in the flesh" or in Platinum's product catalogue. So, when I saw a bunch of them in a bookstore called Book 1st we wandered into without premeditation, I just had to get one. The price was oddly unmarked, and turned out to be slightly more than the garden-variety Preppy with 03 nib; but it was still cheaper than the MUJI-rebranded version.

We strolled close to Kingdom Note in Shinjuku in the evening, that I just had to drop in again. My wife talked me out of buying another bottle of Dorcus hopei binodulosus ink, so I ended up picking this one instead.

At dinner, I saw my wife busy scribbling on a sheet from the hotel room's notepad. She said she lost the sheet she was using earlier in the day, and had to rewrite one while the details were still fresh in her mind. So I picked these Midori Diamond Memo reporter-style A5 notebooks up in a nearby department store called Keio, in which the stationery section turned out to be run by Itoya; even the paper bag the staff put the goods was Itoya's. (I can get the black version of these more cheaply from Amazon.co.jp, and in fact I'd ordered four of those with "free" delivery scheduled for Saturday, to exhaust the Amazon points I won't otherwise use when I'm outside Japan, before I heard her story.)

The Pilot Lightive pen was actually ordered the day before, but delivered today. I placed the order at 7:30AM, and sent a note to the Amazon Marketplace seller asking them to make sure I receive the item by Friday as Amazon promised, even though it would be shipped independently by the seller. I heard back before 8AM, and got the shipping notification by 8:30AM.