Story

The Notebook That Came With a Creature on the Cover

The Japonica Gakushū-chō has been in every Japanese elementary school since 1970. It arrived in your bag before the first day, with a real photograph of an insect or plant on the cover. Nobody chose it. It was just there.

The notebook American kids bring to school has a black-and-white marble pattern. A composition book. The pattern means nothing. It’s just a pattern.

The notebook Japanese kids brought to elementary school had a creature on the cover.

A snake, close enough to count the scales. A flower filling the frame so completely the petals had nowhere else to go. Insects, animals, plants — whatever it was, it was a photograph. A real photograph. Printed large, in the center.

That was the Japonica Gakushū-chō — the Japonica Study Notebook.

Nobody Decided This

Nobody decided this. Your family went to the neighborhood stationery shop — a bunbōgu-ya — and came back with one. The idea of buying a different brand rarely came up. If everyone in your class used the same notebook, you used it too.

But you could choose the cover.

Each subject — Japanese language, arithmetic, the daily communication notebook passed between teachers and parents — came in several cover options. Two kids with the same subject notebook might have different photographs. In a world of school supplies where your only job was to write your name in the blank, that was a small but real choice.

The notebook display at the bunbōgu-ya was arranged like a picture-book stand. Not stacked flat — standing upright, covers facing out, every option visible at once. A tiger’s stare. A sunflower, wide and bright. You had just bought your notebook. By the time you reached the door, the next one was already decided.

Before You Opened It

Showa Note, the notebook manufacturer, launched the Japonica Gakushū-chō in 1970. It cost fifty yen. Standard notebooks at the time cost twenty to thirty. For the first year, almost nothing sold. The turning point was a television commercial — the first TV advertisement ever made for a notebook in Japan — aired during daytime dramas, when housewives were watching. Japan was in the middle of its postwar economic boom, and parents were spending on education. Cumulative sales today exceed 1.4 billion copies.

The notebook wasn’t one product. It was a system. The Japanese language notebook had ruled squares sized for practicing kanji — one character per box, calibrated to the grade level. The arithmetic notebook had finer grids with cross-reference lines for keeping columns aligned. Each subject had its own format. Before you opened it, this notebook already knew what you were studying.

The Pages Before the First Page

There were pages before the first blank page.

Inside the front and back covers, every edition carried a few pages of educational reference material — short readings on African wildlife, world travel, food, the natural environment. Nothing to do with the homework. I read them anyway. During breaks, before class started, with the notebook open on my desk.

In Japan at the time, owning a home encyclopedia set was a marker of status. Not every family had one. The Japonica Gakushū-chō tucked a fragment of that into every subject notebook, every year. From 1978, the cover photographs came from a single source: the late wildlife photographer Yamaguchi Susumu, who spent decades traveling the world under exclusive commission to document insects and plants that most Japanese children had never seen. His work wasn’t decorative. It was documentation.

This notebook assumed children could handle a version of the world slightly larger than the one they already knew.

The Grid Got Smaller Every Year

The grid squares shrank every year.

First grade, large. Second grade, smaller. Third grade, smaller still. Kanji practice means copying characters into grid squares — learning the form and stroke order until the hand remembers it. Teachers assigned homework by the page: three pages of kanji practice. It sounds like a fixed amount. It isn’t — the weight changes with the grade. With large squares, three pages is an hour’s work. With squares half the size, the same three pages becomes something else. The teacher said three pages. The weight of those three pages, though — that may have been set by Showa Note.

Around fourth grade, most kids moved on from the Japonica Gakushū-chō. The next notebook was the Kokuyo Campus — plain ruled lines, no photographs, no reference pages. The first time I held one, I felt older.

The Day the Bugs Disappeared

Not every child had welcomed the covers.

A classmate’s notebook sitting on the desk with a close-up insect or reptile on the cover — that was enough to cause a small, real discomfort. Among girls especially. The photographs were that realistic. The feeling was minor, but it accumulated slowly, over decades.

In 2012, insects disappeared from the Japonica Gakushū-chō covers.

Parents had been sending in complaints — the insects were kimochi warui, disgusting. Japan’s largest financial newspaper covered the story. Discussion spread online. Adults who had grown up with the notebooks had opinions. For a product already fifty years old, the response was intense. The following year, the covers shifted to flowers and plants. A limited-edition run briefly brought the insects back. They didn’t return permanently.

In 2025, fifty-five years after the launch, Showa Note announced the most significant redesign in the product’s history.

The photographs would stop. All covers would become illustrations. The new theme: kyōsei — coexistence — animals, plants, and insects living in relationship with each other, drawn by the picture-book duo tupera tupera. The insects would return to the covers, this time as illustrations. Sitting gently on leaves. Sharing space with flowers.

For fifty-five years, the Japonica Gakushū-chō had carried real photographs. The late Yamaguchi Susumu’s work. A caterpillar was a caterpillar. A snake was a snake. They were there because they were real.