Questions re ordering bulk Tomoe River from Japan

May 27, 2021

Vertical eyes? Ok, so Google is mangling a translation.

I'm looking to buy some A3 short-grain paper on Rakuten, via a 3rd party shipper, and I'm trying to figure out the order. What I want is 52gsm paper of the same kind we all know and love for use with fountain pens (without getting hung up on new vs old Tomoe). I want the paper intended for ink pens, and not something intended for offset printing that does a horrible job with a pen (others here have made this expensive mistake). Anyhow, I think this is the "N" i.e. "notebook" paper. If somebody knows otherwise I'd appreciate a correction.

The bigger question is the paper grain. Google translates my options as "vertical" and "horizontal", which I find unobvious because, well, whether I fold the paper vertically or horizontally depends on how I have it situated in front of me 🙂

I'm looking at https://item.rakuten.co.jp/auc-shikisai/50601/ as the thing to buy.

This vendor has a page that is explaining grain and probably does a great job for a Japanese speaker that doesn't understand paper grain. See https://item.rakuten.co.jp/auc-shikisai/c/0000000132/. Using google's translation I have a to make a lot of leaps of faith. I think I want horizontal, but my confidence is not high.

May 28, 2021

5 hours ago, XYZZY said:

What I want is 52gsm paper of the same kind we all know and love for use with fountain pens

I think that deliberately all-encompassing blanket statement is incorrect. I have a pack of that paper, I know it, I've used it with fountain pens, and I do not like it much less love it.

5 hours ago, XYZZY said:

Anyhow, I think this is the "N" i.e. "notebook" paper. If somebody knows otherwise I'd appreciate a correction.

I think that interpretation is also incorrect.

Other posts on FPN have alluded to the ‘N’ designation applies to paper produced by Tomoegawa's ‘new’ machinery, i.e. paper milling machine no.9 (instead of paper milling machine no.7 which was shutdown in December 2019).

How Sakae Technical Paper uses ‘N’ in its (Tomoe River FP) product codes is a different matter. At a glance, it does appear that the ‘N’ in TMR-A[0-9]N* indeed stands for ‘note’ , i.e. notebook. However, you are not buying retail products distributed by Sakae Technical Paper in bulk/reams from that Rakuten seller to which you linked, as far as I can tell, so you should only be concerned about Tomoegawa's use of the designation and not Sakae Technical Paper's.

May 28, 2021

If horizontal is the one with the Y in blue I agree with you.

May 28, 2021

9 hours ago, A Smug Dill said:

… I do not like it much less love it.

Nevertheless, I do like scoring a better deal than the next consumer, even if it's for stuff I don't enjoy all that much and think it's overhyped (even if, to be fair, it's neither “pretty average” nor “ordinary”, in Aussie parlance I never quite understood even after living for decades here) and flawed in its own way. I'm irrational and obsessive live that.

While I was out for a run today, I recalled the calculations I did back in 2018, when I just started my deepest dive into the hobby yet and first came across mentions and worship of Tomoe River paper, without having tried it out for myself or decided the product is blah and not for me. One lot of 4,000 Tomoe River FP 52g/m² A4 sheets, from the seller to which the O.P. linked, would have cost me about A$400 after shipping and forwarding agent's fees, etc. so $10 per 100 sheets on average, which is about double what I would pay a retailer for a Sakae TP pack of 100 sheets when a 15%–20% discount offer pops up from time to time.

I'm sure some Higher Being decided to teach me about my weaknesses and folly, because when I got home, I saw a targeted offer that effectively allowed me to buy five or six 100-sheet packs of the Sakae TP 52g/m² A4 sheets for an effective out-of-pocket expense of less than A$10 each (after/including shipping). I just couldn't help myself; it's like how some fellow hobbyists are obsessed with being ‘expressive’ by writing with a flex nib without deliberate calligraphic effort and discipline, I just had to ‘express’ myself by snapping the offer up because I can, before the window of opportunity closed; a bargain-hunting fool is what I am and how I identify.

Yes, Lord; Thy lesson is noted, and I'm humbly reminded of my character flaws, and how easy it is for other parties (e.g. retailers or Amazon) to push my buttons, as I often push others' unrepentantly. I cannot just shed my obsessions any more than they can theirs. This time, the joke is on me.

Now that it's done… maybe my pre-teen nieces will enjoy drawing on them, when I've just given them some fountain pens as well as watercolour pencils.

May 28, 2021

11 hours ago, A Smug Dill said:

I think that deliberately all-encompassing blanket statement is incorrect. I have a pack of that paper, I know it, I've used it with fountain pens, and I do not like it much less love it.

I think that interpretation is also incorrect.

Other posts on FPN have alluded to the ‘N’ designation applies to paper produced by Tomoegawa's ‘new’ machinery, i.e. paper milling machine no.9 (instead of paper milling machine no.7 which was shutdown in December 2019).

How Sakae Technical Paper uses ‘N’ in its (Tomoe River FP) product codes is a different matter. At a glance, it does appear that the ‘N’ in TMR-A[0-9]N* indeed stands for ‘note’ , i.e. notebook. However, you are not buying retail products distributed by Sakae Technical Paper in bulk/reams from that Rakuten seller to which you linked, as far as I can tell, so you should only be concerned about Tomoegawa's use of the designation and not Sakae Technical Paper's.

Thanks!

As for my "we all know and love" comment, I retain the right to use sweeping generalizations and assume that others realize they're generalizations. But there's another use for a generalizations on FPN: they have a way of attracting the attention of a particular fellow who tends to provide valuable and precise information after pointing out the flaw of the generalization 🙂

I suspect (i.e. I don't have proof) that the "N is for New" is incorrect. I can guess that somebody made that inference, which was not a crazy inference, but then given the powers of the internet it was copy/pasted enough times to constitute some modern version of "proof". Anyhow, I think I had seen the "N" before the whole "TR is changing OMG OMG OMG" thing last year, but it could still be that what I saw was 68N made on the No.9 mill whereas the 52 gsm hadn't yet moved to that machine.

But I'm concerned that the page you linked to implies that, at least for the 68N, that "68N" isn't sufficient to know what you're getting: there may be two different things called that, one of which has been tweaked for FPs, and the other hasn't. Or it could be that the two different kinds are a before/after kind of thing: before there was only one thing called that, after there was only one thing with that name, albeit a different thing. Sigh.

Thanks for the link https://www.tomoegawa.co.jp/english/product/paper/tomoe_river_fp.html. I've clicked around on their site but not come across that. And they have information on facebook...I may just have to create a facebook account so that I can better access that.

As for the eyes, after looking at that page again, I'm thinking the vertical/horizontal "eyes" (i.e. grain) are when the paper is held in portrait position. I.e. vertical is long grain, horizontal is short grain.

May 28, 2021

12 hours ago, rafapa said:

If horizontal is the one with the Y in blue I agree with you.

Actually Google translated that as "sideways", not "horizontal". My brain supplied "horizontal" because it was the obvious opposite of "vertical".

This set of images is what convinces me that I want sideways eyes:

May 28, 2021

1 hour ago, XYZZY said:

I suspect (i.e. I don't have proof) that the "N is for New" is incorrect. I can guess that somebody made that inference, which was not a crazy inference, but then given the powers of the internet it was copy/pasted enough times to constitute some modern version of "proof".

Didn't that come, at least partly, from https://www.musu.bi/stories/2020-07-some-words-on-tomoe-river that was linked to by:

Quote

Is there a way to tell the two versions apart?

The new version of the paper has a modified product code with an additional 'N' appended to it, but this is a classification that is primarily exposed to manufacturers.

May 28, 2021

3 hours ago, A Smug Dill said:

Didn't that come, at least partly, from https://www.musu.bi/stories/2020-07-some-words-on-tomoe-river that was linked to by:

Thanks @A Smug Dill. I stand corrected, again. I thought that Musubi blog post had been taken down last year. I'm going to re-read it right now.

To be honest, I'm not tied to the TR paper. I want something that's very good, and I do consider the TR to be really good. But I've been threatening to start this project(*) for a couple of years and keep making up excuses to put it off. For the longest time "researching paper" has been my excuse. I need to move on.

I'd be perfectly happy with Apica's A.Silky paper, too, but haven't received responses from Apica regarding bulk purchases. 100% cotton would be great, there are some I could buy in the U.S., but "researching cotton paper" would be something else that would get me to procrastinate.

(*) "This project" being copies of the Bible and Qur'an.

May 29, 2021

I believe grain direction is mostly applicable to printers, where the paper has to be rolled around drums and platens... Secondarily it might be of concern if one is folding signatures for binding... Each fold leaves the grain rotated 90 degrees.

May 30, 2021

On 5/28/2021 at 9:25 AM, XYZZY said:

The bigger question is the paper grain. Google translates my options as "vertical" and "horizontal", which I find unobvious because, well, whether I fold the paper vertically or horizontally depends on how I have it situated in front of me 🙂

So, how exactly are you intending to roll, fold and/or bind your A3 sheets?

May 30, 2021

18 hours ago, A Smug Dill said:

So, how exactly are you intending to roll, fold and/or bind your A3 sheets?

Why fold in half, of course. Sorry, couldn't resist.

Fold a single sheet in half to produce a folio of four pages, signatures of probably 8 folios. I intend to temporarily stich up signatures for writing, and do a final binding when done so that I'm not writing in an unwieldy tome. As for the style of binding... I don't know and figure that I can punt on that for multiple years. I've done a few notebooks using double-needle coptic, which seems delightfully old school, but my results...uhhmm...need practice 🙂

July 5, 2022

Apologies for the necro-post, but I wanted to say Thank You to the people that replied here (and elsewhere, I can't find every thread where I've asked for help on this).

Last month I ordered from https://item.rakuten.co.jp/auc-shikisai/50601/, using White Rabbit as the purchasing/forwarding agent. Outside of my nerves regarding whether I would get the correct thing, it all went smoothly. Current exchange rate definitely worked in my favor: the paper itself was $95.04. Shipping via FedEx was $149.48. The high shipping is certainly cringe-worthy, but at the end of the day I decided I had no problem with $250.00.

White Rabbit did a great job on packaging. The box was a single layer of corrugated cardboard, but heavier than I'm used to, with bubble wrap and heavy wadded paper on the inside. The thing about paper is that while it's not going to break if it's handled roughly, it could be ruined if some bozo put their foot through the box. But between the heavy hardboard box and FedEx it arrived in near perfect condition.

One thing of note is that White Rabbit's shipping estimator, which I used before I placed the order, did not have FedEx as an option. The best price I had on the estimator was from from DHL at something like $280, so I was very pleasantly surprised to find FedEx as a much cheaper option when I went to ship it. One tricky thing with the estimator was what to enter for dimensions: in this case the product page I was ordering from did not give size or weight. Weight is easily to calculate from paper weight, area per page, and number of pages (so about 15kg), then added an extra kg for packaging. Dimensions were harder since I was clueless about the box they would use for shipping, but I just took the paper dimensions, estimated the height of the block, and added a few cm for packaging.

ETA: One more thing about White Rabbit. Since I was worried about whether all three options were correctly passed to the vendor (paper size, grain direction, color), I asked White Rabbit if they could send a picture of what they received from the vendor before shipping it to me. Photos are not one of their normal options, but they said they could do it for an extra 500JPY per photo. That's $3.96. Kinda pricy for a cell phone picture, but enough to keep people from yanking their chain with silly requests, and relatively small compared to what I was ordering. I splurged for one photo, which showed me that it was mostly what I wanted. The vendor didn't write the grain direction on the package so I had to take that on faith, but when it arrived it was easy to determine the grain was correct, too.

July 5, 2022

Somehow I've missed this thread before now. Good to know that you were able to get what you wanted, XYXXY.

As for the grain of the paper, it's a little more complicated than what Baron Wulfraed said. My understanding (which admittedly is pretty minimal, in that the "papermaking class I took in college was more about recycling paper into pulp to make "art".... zzzzz) is that the grain of the paper is based on how it's processed to begin with and while it may be an issue with printers it actually has more to do with how the paper tears: if you're ripping up a piece of paper you'll get more of a straight tear along the grain: whereas, IME, you'll get more of a jagged or uneven tear along the crossgrain. If you're cutting the paper, it probably doesn't matter so much, and won't even be that noticeable unless you're using what's call "laid" paper (where the grain is more visible if you hold a sheet of paper up to the light) -- that implies it was less likely to just be paper pulp and more likely to have been made as individual sheets. Which in turn will depend on what your final use will be -- drawing/watercolor paper or "nice" stationery, vs. printer paper, vs. newsprint vs. hardcover books.

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

July 5, 2022

57 minutes ago, inkstainedruth said:

Somehow I've missed this thread before now. Good to know that you were able to get what you wanted, XYXXY.

As for the grain of the paper, it's a little more complicated than what Baron Wulfraed said. My understanding (which admittedly is pretty minimal, in that the "papermaking class I took in college was more about recycling paper into pulp to make "art".... zzzzz) is that the grain of the paper is based on how it's processed to begin with and while it may be an issue with printers it actually has more to do with how the paper tears: if you're ripping up a piece of paper you'll get more of a straight tear along the grain: whereas, IME, you'll get more of a jagged or uneven tear along the crossgrain. If you're cutting the paper, it probably doesn't matter so much, and won't even be that noticeable unless you're using what's call "laid" paper (where the grain is more visible if you hold a sheet of paper up to the light) -- that implies it was less likely to just be paper pulp and more likely to have been made as individual sheets. Which in turn will depend on what your final use will be -- drawing/watercolor paper or "nice" stationery, vs. printer paper, vs. newsprint vs. hardcover books.

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

Indeed. It definitely impacts tearing, and if you're producing forms that are intended to be folded or torn (even if perforated) it helps to get the grain in the correct direction.

If you're binding the paper into a book you want the grain to run parallel to the binding for two reasons. First, it makes the pages easier to turn: it's easier to bend (whether turning a page or folding a sheet) if the bend is parallel to the grain. But, from what I gather, the more important reason is that paper breathes: it absorbs and releases moisture as the humidity changes, and the paper will naturally curl/uncurl parallel to the paper (if ever so slightly). So you want that curling to be parallel to the binding, otherwise the curling will tend to crack/tear the spine.

I have always been under the impression that laid paper is not the same as the fiber grain itself, but is instead an artifact of the mesh that the pulp is poured onto for forming the sheets: for laid paper there's a top layer of wires (instead of a more typical wove screen), and those wires leave a slight imprint on the surface. But I guess that at a macroscopic level that probably has the same mechanical issues/attributes as align fibers, since it will encourage/discourage bending/tearing/curling.

I have a brother that used to be a plant engineer for a couple of different paper manufacturers (big ones, producing tons/day). They don't normally give public tours: a paper mill is noisy, hot, very humid, and dangerous. But in 1998 he took me on a private tour which was fantastic. Anyhow, he is also good at explaining the mechanics of the production process to me. One interesting thing about paper grain is that it's an artifact of modern paper production. You start with a giant vat of pulp (and water: it's mostly water at the beginning), and that pulp/water slurry is drawn out into a flat plane that becomes the paper. That process has a side effect of aligning the fibers of the pulp, and that's where the grain comes from. If you are instead making paper by hand where you have a handheld mesh that you dip into the vat of pulp then the fibers will never get aligned and the paper has no grain.

July 5, 2022

Thanks for the information, XYZZY. That was a great explanation (I figured that I was getting details wrong because of course it's been roughly 4 decades since I took the class and -- like I said -- we weren't making paper so much as we were making paper "art"....

I actually had also taken a workshop in bookbinding, years ago at someone's house, but I wasn't all that good at it (somewhere I've still got the book I made, but of course the instructor provided all the materials). I don't even remember whether I ever did anything with the book other than to say "Look what I made last weekend!"

A few years later the same woman and a friend of mine were supposed to be putting together a book of commissioned calligraphy/illlumination done by various local SCA scribes: for every commission the scribe could do something for themselves as well. I did something for my husband and then a page quoting a passage out of Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parizival (translated into English of course). And I also did a big bargello needlepoint project to use for the cover. Only the book never happened -- she got bored and my friend moved out of state and dumped the project onto someone else -- who then didn't have the time and dumped it off on yet a fourth person (and when I asked THAT person about it a few years later, HIS response was "Oh, you mean the great Baronial pamphlet project?" and I never brought it up to either Dave or Doug again.... :huh: Which was really sad because it would have been a great brag book -- "Oh look and see what these people did and how talented they are, and you really should be considering them for X arts award" (my stuff was pretty minimal in comparison, but I thought it was a cool project).