About Bungu Daily.

Bungu Daily is an English-language record of the Japanese stationery tradition. We started it for the same reason a stationer in Hiratsuka keeps his shop the way his grandfather did: there is a long, slow craft here, and it deserves to be looked at carefully.

Most of what we cover hasn't been written about in English. The Bunbōguyasan Taishō, Japan's annual stationery awards, are voted on by 800 specialty-shop staff each spring. Loft, Tsutaya, Tokyu Hands — the great department stores of Tokyo — publish their ranking charts only in Japanese. We translate them, walk the shelves, and tell you what the data leaves out.

How we work

• We translate Japanese sources directly — Bunbōguyasan Taishō, BUN2 Magazine, the Loft and Tsutaya quarterly bulletins.
• We test what we recommend. A pen we've never inked is a pen we won't write about.
• We cite the original publisher and link back. Translation is a debt to be paid in attribution.
• Affiliate links are disclosed inline. We don't accept payment for placement.
• Our content is AI-assisted in research and translation, and human-edited in voice. The opinions are ours.

What we are not

We are not a marketplace, not a brand consultant, not a retailer. We don't sell pens. We don't accept advertising on the homepage. We are an editorial publication, the kind that used to live in quarterly-magazine racks and now lives in your inbox.

Affiliate disclosure

Some product links on this site are affiliate links. If you buy through one, we may earn a small commission at no additional cost to you. Our recommendations are independent and never bought. When in doubt, assume the cheaper, less-affiliate-linked alternative is probably the one we use ourselves.

Write to us

If we got something wrong, missed a maker, or wrote about your grandfather's pen factory: please write to hello@bungudaily.com. We answer slowly but always.

— The Editors