So it’s a Filofax?
Not a bad comparison. I used Filofaxes for nearly ten years in Hong Kong and when I moved to Japan in 1997 they were just as popular there as well. I took a business trip at the time to San Diego and everyone looked at me as if I was a weirdo. I’d lived in Asia too long, I had internalized part of culture there that is largely missing in the States. Many of the comments in this thread sound exactly like what I’d heard during my San Diego trip in 1999.
The pace of life in Hong Kong required people to manage a lot more information than people in San Diego at the time, so Hong Kong people tended to be heavy users of organizers like the Filofax. In Japan, things were a bit more relaxed, but the Japanese have a concept of quality that is largely missing in the States. Midori is a Filofax re-imagined as something that is simple, elegant and beautiful. I have given up expecting the vast majority of people in the States to grok this. And this thread has confirmed it.
