In general, I find Japan to be unmatched when it comes to stationery. Pens, pencils, notebooks, etc... Everything is just better: the simple stuff, like what you can find in "konbini" and "100 yen shops", entire floors in department stores like "Hands", and all the way up to luxury. As you might expect, Japanese brands of stationery are popular worldwide.
So it is not surprising that Japan had a golden age of pencils, and that you can still buy the products today and that they are still the best.
They are very good at higher end paper, pencils and erasers. Their gel and roller pens are mostly unmatched.
OTOH, while they're top tier in fountain pens, Germans really equal with them. Lamy, Faber Castell, Diplomat, Kaweco and of course Montblanc make great pens. Pilot & Sailor are not behind them, though. Mitsubishi Pencil bought Lamy so things will get interesting.
Inks are the same. Germans and Japanese are head to head. OTOH, except Leuchttrum and Rhodia, I can't find many fountain pen first papers from Europe.
Funnily, when it comes to fountain pens, there's another interesting contender. China. While they copy most of the stuff, their domestic brands make great pens and ink.
Also, a company in my country started making a paper which rivals Yu-Sari and Tomoe River. I write letters with it, and it's great.
I use Quo Vadis Habana blank notebooks with (mostly) Lamy fountain pens and Sailor inks. They have Clairefontaine paper that just works wonderfully -- it both dries quickly and doesn't bleed through. If you haven't tried them, you're in for a treat; enjoy!
(I believe Quo Vadis to be a Canadian company that mostly makes planners and such, and their notebooks are getting harder to find. Even the good folks at Goulet Pens have given up trying to keep them in stock. When I come across some, I stock up.)
My first PhD advisor was German, and he introduced me to LAMY pens. Everyone in our lab was given a hardcover notebook and a LAMY pen, and there were plenty of ink cartridges that we could use. I don’t use fountain pens these days, preferring pencil instead, but I remember how nice those pens were.
While I’m on the topic of German stationery, I regularly use my Staedtler eraser and pencil sharpener.
I keep a stable of inked pens. The set is half Japanese, half German all the time. I find Lamy superior for leak resistance and ruggedness, and they're repairable if you manage to damage them also, their tipping is one of the best and fastest polishing/adapting ones if not the best. Japanese ones tend to stay at my desk at home, since they're more delicate writing instruments (except Pilot Metropolitan.That's a tank), but I enjoy them all the same, regardless of their price points and materials.
BTW, if you have not tried Montblanc's Royal Blue give it a chance. That one is "different". Also Scrikss's blue black ink is nice.
The notebook using this paper is called Meteksan Prestige [0]. I don't know if they're exported or not.
Notebook looks good, much less expensive than Rhodia or Yu-Sari for 300 sheets of A5, assuming paper quality is as advertised. Priced in dollars although I’m not sure if they actually ship to to the us.
Yeah I never came across those Japanese products given the available German brands, of which there's also Staedtler, Faber-Castell, Stabilo, and Rotring, in addition to those already mentioned.
If anything, I had thought Japan were known to produce fine markers/felt-tip pens.
I love my Platinum fountain pens far more than the Lamys or other European fountain pens. No matter how many times I try I always go back to the Platinum PTL-5000A, which has been discontinued (thankfully I got a backup).
It's a matter of taste, and that's OK. Platinum is a great brand, but it doesn't resonate with me much. Sailor's ProGear and Pilot is where my heart is when it comes to Japanese pens.
On the other hand, I find entry level German pens great for everyday carry. They're very rugged, and easy to replace, if you can damage them.
I'm happy that you found your grail pen, because having one is a great feeling.
I exclusively use Japanese writing implements, and hand-wrote all of my notes when I was in college. (Saved carrying a laptop around, and some professors were sticklers about not having laptops out during lectures.)
* Pilot Metropolitan fountain pen and Namiki ink
* Pilot G2 is my "minimum" pen, though I vastly prefer roller ball pens.
* Uniball Air Micro
* Pilot Precise V2
* When I need a pencil, I use the Uni Kuru Toga, a mechanical pencil that slowly rotates the lead to keep it sharp. Before that, I used the Pilot pencils that use the G2 body.
* Recently, I ordered a Metacil "infinity pencil" out of curiosity. It's an aluminum pencil with a very dense tip that writes like an ordinary pencil, but is supposed to last a very long time.
I am the same. I have used V5, V7 an VBall Pilots. I even checked their webpage to check if the V2s were some kind of premium line I didn't know, but found nothing.
What it's even more puzzling is the children comment that totally remembers them.
Pilot Precise V2 got me through grad school and when I started journaling recently, a set of those was the first thing I went and picked up. Great pens.
I love the Leuchturm 1917 A4 Master Notebook with a dotted grid but the smaller B5 dotted grid notebook from Japan, the Maruman 104 Mnemosyne, is also perfect and easier to travel with.
So it is not surprising that Japan had a golden age of pencils, and that you can still buy the products today and that they are still the best.