Japanese stationery

The Japanese do love their stationery, which is reason enough to want to visit there someday, in my eyes. I have loved the Japanese site Jetpens for a long time, and I'm always browsing through looking for some new cool pen or paper. Our favorite pencil sharpener is from Jetpens, and Sam gets a lot of his art pens there as well.

We watched this Begin Japanology episode about stationery, and one of the interesting things we learned was that the ink from erasable Frixion pens turns clear when it's heated. That should have been obvious, maybe, since that's the whole point of the friction eraser (it heats the ink so it will turn clear and disappear) but we were still excited enough about it to test it for ourselves.

Abe wrote with one of our Frixion markers on this paper:

And when we held the paper under a hair dryer, sure enough, the ink began to disappear! Soon the whole paper looked white again. So cool!

We also watched this episode on Japanese scissors, which made me really want to try some U-shaped spring scissors sometime.