News

Journaling through Jimbocho: three of our favourite spots to put on paper

Hobonichi brought the notebook. We brought the itinerary. Here’s what happened when we took the team behind the Hobonichi Techo around three Time Out Tokyo favourites

Written by

Jasmina Mitrovic

Staff WriterTuesday 25 August 2026

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Email WhatsApp

Advertising

Jimbocho has no shortage of ways to lose an afternoon. Its pavements spill over with secondhand books, century-old shopfronts sit beside modern coffee counters, and almost every doorway seems to lead to another niche collection. It is a neighbourhood that rewards taking your time – and paying attention to the small things.

Earlier this year, the Jimbocho-based Hobonichi team guided us around three of the area’s best stationery shops. This time, we returned the favour. They brought along a blank Hobonichi Techo and we took them to three of our favourite local spots, filling the journal’s pages as we went.

The idea wasn’t to make a perfect itinerary. Instead, we wanted to see what the neighbourhood would look like once it had been reduced to notes, photographs, colours and the strange little objects that caught our attention along the way. Here’s where we went.

(Former) Tsuruya Tailor

Our first stop was (Former) Tsuruya Tailor, a shop that reveals almost nothing from its name. The building was constructed in 1928 in the kanban kenchiku style, a type of early Showa-era shophouse architecture with a Western-inspired façade. It once housed a bespoke menswear business that continued for three generations; today, the former tailor’s niece has turned it into one of Jimbocho’s most delightfully unclassifiable shops.

Inside, vintage books, clothing, tableware, accessories and Showa-era curios compete for every centimetre of space. There are also original bags and small goods made with suiting fabric left from the tailoring days. Being inside elicits the same feeling as opening a particularly eccentric family drawer – precisely the right place to give a blank journal its first bit of personality.

Dill Coffee Parlor

After all that visual stimulation, we needed somewhere to stop, eat and work out what had just happened. A short walk from Jimbocho in Kanda-Nishikicho, Dill Coffee Parlor opened in 2024 as a handsome two-storey café serving specialty coffee, lunch and American-style baked treats.

Its huge front door, made with 200-year-old wood from India, opens onto a warm interior of dark timber, mid-century furniture and contemporary art.

We spread the journal across the table over lunch, added notes from the first stop and began making sense of the day. Dill works particularly well as a journaling break: there is room to settle in, enough natural light to inspect your growing collage and, crucially, coffee when the blank page starts fighting back.

Komiyama Bookstore

The final stop was Komiyama Bookstore, a Jimbocho institution founded in 1939. Across its four storeys, the shop moves between photobooks, fashion, contemporary art, Japanese culture, vintage posters and rare editions, with shelves and glass cases that feel closer to a densely packed private archive than a conventional bookstore.

Komiyama is the kind of place where one book cover can change the direction of an entire page. We climbed through the store looking for visual references – colour combinations, type, photography and printed matter – to carry into the journal’s final composition. You do not need to be hunting for a collector’s item to leave inspired; browsing is enough to reset your eye.

Komiyama Shoten — Photo: Keisuke TanigawaBrowsing at Komiyama

By the end of the route, the blank pages had become a portable version of Jimbocho: part diary, part scrapbook and part moodboard. Photographs overlapped with handwritten notes, stickers and fragments collected from the day. It was not a comprehensive guide to the neighbourhood, but that was the point. Journaling gave us an excuse to look closer and record the details that an ordinary itinerary would leave out.