Tombow

Tombow's story begins in 1913, when a 28-year-old Harunosuke Ogawa opened a small stationery shop in Asakusa — the same neighbourhood in Tokyo that remains a pilgrimage site for anyone serious about traditional craft. Having spent years as a wholesaler in Nihonbashi, Ogawa had mastered what the Japanese call the four treasures of writing: ink, brush, inkstone, and paper. His shop offered both traditional Japanese stationery and imported Western pencils, and he quickly earned a reputation as someone who actually knew what he was selling. By 1927, Ogawa had registered the dragonfly — tonbo in Japanese — as the company's trademark, a symbol chosen for its deep cultural resonance: the dragonfly has long stood in Japan for precision, agility, and good fortune. The MONO brand followed in 1963, introduced first as a line of premium drawing pencils and eventually expanding into the erasers and correction tools that have made it one of the most recognizable names in Japanese stationery. Over more than a century, Tombow has grown from a single shop into one of Japan's top stationery manufacturers — producing everything from graphite pencils and brush pens to adhesive tape and rollerball pens — without ever straying from the principle that quietly good tools are worth making well.