An Honest Review of Sanzen Tomoe River Paper

This was a really hard review to make…

My Favorite Paper…

Believe me when I say that I’ve been cheering and hoping for a successful successor to Tomoe River paper for a while.

Tomoe River quickly became my favorite writing paper the very first time I tried. I’d previously experiment with many others, Rhodia, Clairefontaine, Moleskin notebooks…. I was constantly testing and trying out papers, always finding challenges with either the quality or consistency of many papers I’d tried.

Several were fine, but when I tested Tomoe River for the first time – I knew I’d found something special.

I never encountered any ink feathering, bleeding, and show-through was shockingly good for a paper that’s incredibly thin.

Even better – Tomoe River showed off better than any other paper I’d tried, the wonderful ink properties I was growing to love so much in my journey with fountain pens. The shading and especially sheening were eye-poppingly beautiful.

Eventually I also fell in love with broad nib, Blackletter calligraphy and wondered – could this magical paper withstand the exceptional volume of ink that pours from an ink broad nib pen?

Surely this is where it would meet it’s match and feather and bleed terribly? 

Nope. It worked great – holding up to almost every single ink I tried. 

I bought notebooks filled with sheets of this miraculous paper and lived in calligraphic bliss until…

The Big Change

Before I jump into the big, shocking development that happened in 2019, a little bit of history…

Sometime around 1981, Tomoegawa, a Japanese manufacturer, released Tomoe River paper – a lightweight, coated paper that I learned about around 30ish years later. In my defense, I was a kid for most of that period, and my weekly allowance didn’t really cover the cost of fountain pens and related supplies.

Skip ahead a few years, and around the spring of 2019, Tomoegawa announced that the machine producing Tomoe River, the “Number 7” machine, would be decommissioned at the end of that year.

The silver lining, though, was that production would be moved to another machine at the same plant – the “Number 9” machine.

This gave birth to the “new” version of the paper that we in the writing community logically called “New Tomoe River Paper”

This wasn’t the end of the saga, though – a couple of years later, in 2021, Tomoegawa really scared the writing community by announcing that they were going to shut down the #9 machine by the end of the year – this was the one that was making the “new” paper. 

This meant the total end of Tomoe River Paper.

Honestly, I wasn’t much of a fan of New Tomoe River Paper (we’ll get to that in a minute), so the news didn’t hit me as hard as it may have others… but a few months later, in 2021, something interesting happened.

Tomoegawa announced that it was selling all rights to Tomoe River to Sanzen Paper, another Japanese manufacturer who would continue to make the paper…

At this point, the pen and stationery communities breathed a collective sigh of relief. 

The Final Contender

The latest version of Tomoe River paper now made by Sanzen is called “Tomoe River Successor”

So, in the video I test this new successor paper to see how it stacks up against the previous two versions…

Although I was cautiously optimistic, I didn’t get my hopes up too high because I was a bit disappointed in how the second version of paper performed for the style of calligraphy that I do.

Here are couple of writing samples with the word “calligraphy” – here’s how it looks on the original paper:

And now here’s how it looks on the new version of the paper… the second paper definitely performed more poorly (and this was with written with the smallest broad nib pen that I have!).

I wrote both of the samples under essentially identical conditions – same pen and same day literally within seconds of each other.

This amount of feathering made the new version unusable for me.  

But  the question is – how does the latest “successor” paper compare? Will it resurrect my original champ, or will I be forever saying goodbye to my favorite? 

The Verdict

Check out the video for my live reaction (and disappointed surprise) as I noticed the Sanzen paper bleeding badly within just a few moments of starting the test and comparison between the three papers. I was genuinely heartbroken when the reality sunk in that my favorite paper was gone forever…

I show all the details in the video, but are a couple of examples of how the ink test turned out on all three papers, starting with Original Tomoe River Paper:

Next is “New” Tomoe River Paper

And finally, the latest contender – Sanzen Tomoe River paper.

Where do we go from here?

Although it was really sad to say goodbye to Tomoe River, I’ve since found a contender that I’m really happy with – Canson XL Marker Paper. 

Like Tomoe River, it’s thin, work great with any ink I’ve tried, and shows off all of those wonderful ink properties really well. It’s also larger and usually less expense (you can get a 9″x12″ pad of 100 sheets) so you can fit more “calligrafun” on each page.

The only downside is that I haven’t found any notebooks that are made with this paper, but I’m still just happy have a new paper that works just as well – even if I have to use them as loose sheets. 

Note: This post and the photos within it may contain affiliate links. If you purchase something through the link, I may receive a commission at no extra charge to you.

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