2023 | 11 min read
Loft’s yellow logo has remained unchanged since 1987, when Loft first opened as an annex of the Seibu department store next door. The distinctive wordmark flowed from the pen of Ikko Tanaka, one of the greats of Japanese graphic design. Tanaka himself oversaw the entire branding for Loft, from signage to packaging, in his role as creative director of Seibu at the time. That “o” though! The Loft logo is a case study in Tanaka’s signature use of empty space, while the stark geometry and soaring letterforms possibly display the influence of his 1960s sojourn in New York.
The first Loft opened here in Shibuya before expanding to other parts of Tokyo and other cities across Japan. Loft was a new type of store that sold stationery and other small goods at affordable prices in high places: the new mixed-use developments springing up near busy train stations. Like Parco did for fashion, Loft appealed to a younger demographic than Seibu’s main stores. It was an attempt to move beyond the stuffy image of the department store. Yes, it’s a lot like Tokyu Hands. And it’s far from being the only wonderful stationery store in Tokyo: there’s also the venerable Itoya in Ginza, the more arty Sekaido in Shinjuku, and many others besides.
All of this makes Tokyo a kind of stationery wonderland. The city is dotted with retail temples to deskbound objects, from Midori cotton-paper notebooks to Pilot Juice Up gel-ink pens to Penco neon brush writers. Other cities besides Tokyo can be wonderful in many ways, but they always seem lacking in one department: the stationery department. Happily, stationery makes an affordable and portable souvenir, the perfect aid package for the stationery-deprived. Just be aware that there are people who don’t much like receiving pens and pencils as a gift. “What am I supposed to do with this?” you can almost hear them thinking, as if presented with a washboard or transistor radio. I get it, for some people the world has moved on. For the rest of us, there’s Loft.
Stationery could bring a sense of order and purpose to your life. It might even be a balm for troubled times. But what really explained its capacity to delight? Surprisingly little has been written about stationery, considering all the great thinkers must have been intimate with it over the years. Did they never contemplate the utensils they held in their mitts and sometimes in their mouthes? Countless pencils have been sharpened, nibs dipped, and biros chewed by the greatest minds in history, but no grand or even acceptable theory of stationery has emerged. In fact, stationery has been the recipient of more violence than love.
The word stationery is often misspelt. It’s easily confused with stationary, or not moving. The two words are of course distantly related. To be stationed is to remain in one place. The “stationers” of medieval Europe were the first merchants to set up shop instead of peddling their wares on the road. Why? Because books and papers were too heavy to lug around. There was also a newly captive market and area of high footfall for stationery goods: the universities that began to appear across Europe during the late middle ages. Stationery gave birth to modern retail.
Paper had made a long journey to Europe from China, where it was invented as long ago as the 1st Century AD. While stationery in Europe was a medium of exchange, the accessory to a culture of letters, in China it was a sign of virtue. In China, and later in Japan, possession of books and scrolls by man-about-town and hermit alike was taken to be a sign of learning. Brushes and other writing tools were associated with practice, another Confucian virtue. Bunbōgu, the Japanese word for stationery, consists of three Chinese characters that together mean something like “tools for the writing room”. Stationery was a private affair.
That essentially private world of writing could sometimes spill over into madness. The history of Chinese calligraphy is filled with mad monks, turbulent drunks, and assorted other graphomaniacs who partook a bit too much of the brush. East Asian ideographic writing has always hewed closer to art, and to art’s ugly cousin: madness. But there remains an appreciation for writing by hand, for mastering complex strokes, and for declaring good intentions via the brush or pen. And for that, you needed good tools.
To advance a theory of stationery, the societies of the world could be divided into two types. One in which people continued to revere writing tools as symbols of practice and mastery, and another in which people were conditioned to view pens, pencils and erasers as mere static objects, trivial impediments to the hero’s journey of the self. One built temples like Loft; the other maintained dusty corners of office supplies. One took stationery very seriously; the other made it the punchline of office humour. To be fair, there was also a third type of society in which stationery was hard to come by, but they can be forgiven here.
What type of society was Japan? It was obviously the first type. It was a place that honoured its tools. I got a sense of this during an exhibition last year called The Useful and the Beautiful at Setagaya Art Museum. It was a retrospective of the life’s work of Sotaro Miyagi, one-time creative director at Askul and Japan’s most prolific designer of stationery and office supplies. If you’ve ever worked in an office in Japan, you’ll have come into contact with Miyagi’s creations multiple times each day, from box files to staplers, receipt books to, yes, even toilet paper. His functional yet inimitable style reaches everywhere.
Askul is a mail-order service that began in 1992, when manufacturer Plus was having trouble getting its system filing solution into stores like Loft. Plus worked with one of its lead designers, Sotaro Miyagi, to develop the concept of Askul (from asu kuru, meaning “arrives tomorrow”) and a logo depicting a pictographic man stridently delivering a pencil. Askul’s private-label products were designed to be timeless and fit into an expanding universe of everyday objects whose absence would be keenly felt in the workplace. Their beauty rested in their utility and their ubiquity. While not many Askul products could be labelled beautiful in their own right, they achieved a mesmerising harmony that was beautiful at scale.
Reviewing the writings of Sotaro Miyagi, who died in 2011, it’s hard to discern exactly what drew him to stationery, beyond bland platitudes of being close to people’s everyday lives. But I’m interested in his thoughts on why new products are constantly being born: “Sometimes it’s due to a revolutionary new technology. Sometimes it’s due to changes in people’s lifestyles. Sometimes it’s the need to compete with rival makers. Sometimes it’s just to change the look of something that’s become old or stale.” All of these reasons could be applied to stationery, a relatively simple need that was constantly delivering new wants. If there was a dark side to stationery, it’s that it promoted a kind of turboconsumerism that was intimately bound with Tokyo as a place.
The big three pen manufacturers Pilot, Zebra and Mitsubishi Pencil were constantly pushing out technological innovations, from erasable ballpens for today’s mistake-driven lifestyles to pens that could write upside-down, perfect for the novel you were composing on your ceiling. In other words, they were in the business of manufacturing new desires. I don’t mean the desire for status objects such as expensive fountain pens. Though you’ll find those too at Loft. I’m talking about the mass market for stationery, the affordable luxury that could be marketed even to teenagers. The egalitarian ideal was that, for a modest outlay, anyone could own a design classic and hold it in their hand. And one hit product seemed to exemplify this trend more than any other: the Uni Jetstream 4&1 by Mitsubishi Pencil.
Despite all appearances, Mitsubishi Pencil is not part of the Mitsubishi universe of companies. It claims to have arrived at the name and three-diamond trademark independently of its industrial namesake. Mitsubishi Pencil was established in 1887 by Niroku Masaki in the Shinjuku area of Tokyo. Its founding story is so enchanting that it deserves to be quoted here: “It was at the 1878 Paris World Fair that Mr Masaki observed a pencil for the very first time, and he immediately was inspired to create one for himself. He began performing extensive research and eventually succeeded in producing Japan’s first pencil.”
From such humble soils do stationery empires grow. The company’s first massively successful pencil was sold under the brandname Uni, derived from unique. Jetstream refers to its ballpoint technology. And 4&1 is the combination of four different colours of ink plus one mechanical pencil. The Uni Jetstream 4&1, introduced to the market in 2006, was a complete stationery solution that sold for just 1000 yen.
Multi-functional pens had traditionally been chunky novelties. The Uni Jetstream 4&1 wasn’t svelte, but it fit naturally in the hand. The rubber comfort-grip had real weight, which combined with the ultralight plastic of the upper shaft to produce a pen with solid gravity and extraordinary control at the tip. But the real genius of the pen was mechanical. The individual thrusts that deployed each ink cartridge were clicky enough, but the metallic clip that also deployed the pencil slid into place with the satisfying thunk of a plane’s landing gear. This was nothing less than a service to all humanity, because if writing was thinking, then pen-clicking was thinking extra hard.
The Uni Jetstream 4&1 was one of those products that can create a whole market on its own. Pilot had to scramble to release its own version, the 4+1. At some point, these companies looked at their sales figures and realised that people must be purchasing the pens as gifts. This led to the rise of affordable stationery as a new gift category. Special editions flooded onto the market. They even came in little gift-boxes tailored to your nerdy, cat-loving girlfriend or moustachioed, analogue dad. Like handkerchiefs and socks, a cheap but well-designed pen said “Here, I got you something” without putting a burden on the other person.
I was an early fan of the Jetstream 4&1. I arrived in Tokyo in 2006, the year the product went on sale, and I like to think that our destinies might be entwined. By 2008, I had three versions in rotation: the classic all-black, a classy wine-red edition, and a two-tone silver edition that perhaps didn’t have the clinical edge I attributed to it. I put the 4&1s to work in my first proper job in Tokyo: giving seminars for Japanese professionals who were preparing to study overseas. I can’t say if they were more delighted or dismayed to have their essays and personal statements returned with corrections and suggestions in four different colours of ink.
One of the regular students soon noticed my affection for the 4&1. And here the story takes an extraordinary turn. Kaz was a designer at Mitsubishi Pencil, where he had been working on this very product. He was planning to attend a design school in Denmark before making a career change. Pretty soon, we were collaborating in a form of stationery kaizen. I pointed out things I liked, of which there were many, and reluctantly brought up any design flaws, of which there was only really one. In keeping with the weight distribution strategy of the 4&1, it had a tiny eraser covered by a lightweight cap. This cap was held in place by tiny pressure grips, which could become loose. This was especially the case if you nibbled it from time to time, but I didn’t tell that to Kaz. As a designer, it was his job to ask questions.
Kaz took my concerns to heart and he was soon showing up with little bags of replacement parts. Then he went to Denmark and I eventually moved on from the Jetstream 4&1, but only after converting several others to the faith. I remembered Kaz whenever I saw the Jetstream in places like Loft. More than a decade had passed when I finally looked him up on LinkedIn to discover that he was back in Tokyo and working as a brand consultant. I sent him a message and told him of my plans to write about stationery. We agreed to meet up after work near his office in Shibuya.
Like a lot of Japanese people who’ve lived abroad, Kaz now seemed blessed with a more solid sense of self. Experience probably helped with that too. He was less nervy, more chilled. He was more inclined to simply say what was on his mind. Did he look back fondly on his role in the Jetstream 4&1? “Nah, I was really just a colour coordinator,” he told me. “I designed new colour schemes based on requests from the overseas sales teams.”
Nowadays, Kaz designs complex brand architectures for corporate clients. Our work overlaps to an extent, though I only supply the words: taglines, purpose statements, that kind of thing. After draining our coffees, we started to walk. It was a Friday evening in June: a rare chance to experience daylight after working hours. We walked a bit further to the Tomigaya Itchome Intersection at the southwest corner of Yoyogi Park, where several roads and gentle slopes converge under one of Tokyo’s more agreeable pedestrian bridges. It seemed as good a place as any to pop the question. Did he have a theory of stationery?
“Well,” said Kaz, clearing his throat while taking in the charms of the intersection, as he probably did most days. “Around ten years ago, sales of stationery in Japan actually started to increase again. A lot of designers and creatives had switched to using digital tools, which created this demand for tactile culture, for doing things by hand.” He paused and nodded. “Yeah, I think that’s it.”
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