Bunbōguyasan Taishō 2025 Winners in Review
Every year since 2013, a quiet ceremony unfolds inside the buying offices of Japan's three great stationery chains — Loft (ロフト), Tsutaya (蔦屋書店), and Hands (旧 東急ハンズ). Buyers, floor managers, and category specialists pull their favorite new releases off the shelves, lay them on long tables under fluorescent light, and rate each one across function, design, and creativity. The exercise produces the Bunbōguyasan Taishō (文房具屋さん大賞) — the Stationer's Grand Prix — published in book form each February by Fushosha (扶桑社) and treated, fairly or not, as the bible of Japanese stationery (bunbōgu 文房具, "stationery").
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Last updated: May 2026
Every year since 2013, a quiet ceremony unfolds inside the buying offices of Japan's three great stationery chains — Loft (ロフト), Tsutaya (蔦屋書店), and Hands (旧 東急ハンズ). Buyers, floor managers, and category specialists pull their favorite new releases off the shelves, lay them on long tables under fluorescent light, and rate each one across function, design, and creativity. The exercise produces the Bunbōguyasan Taishō (文房具屋さん大賞) — the Stationer's Grand Prix — published in book form each February by Fushosha (扶桑社) and treated, fairly or not, as the bible of Japanese stationery (bunbōgu 文房具, "stationery").
The 2025 edition was unusual. Over 1,000 items were submitted by manufacturers across the country — roughly the same volume as in 2024, but the winners skewed toward refinement rather than novelty. Last year's awards leaned into gimmick: heat-erasable pastel inks, scented gels, novelty washi. This year, the juries returned to fundamentals — geometry, ink behavior, the quiet engineering of a chisel tip. It is a list that prizes the third revision over the first.
Below, we translate the 2025 results for English readers. We've kept the original Japanese product names where they matter, listed retail prices in both yen and approximate USD, and tried to explain why each item won, not merely that it did.
Editorial article. May earn commissions on linked products. Bunbōguyasan Taishō is an annual awards program by Japanese stationery retailers — we translate and contextualize for English readers.
Quick Answer: 2025 in Four Bullets
- Grand Prize: Pilot Kire-Na (キレーナ) double-sided highlighter — won for a tiny pair of plastic guardrails molded around the chisel tip that prevent ink pooling and keep underlines straight. ¥220 (~$1.45) per pen.
- Ball Pen Award: Pilot Juice+ (ジュースアップ＋) gel pen — a refinement of the cult Juice Up, with a redesigned tip that reduces blobbing on coated paper. ¥220–¥330 depending on point size.
- Fountain Pen Award: Sailor 1911 Casual L — a stainless-steel-nibbed everyday writer at ¥5,500 (~$36) that brought Sailor's flagship feel to a sub-¥6,000 price point.
- Idea Award: King Jim Kōri Jirushi (氷印) clear stamps — flexible silicone stamps shaped like ice cubes, fully transparent so users can see exactly where the impression lands.
The 2025 list is, in short, a list about precision — fewer pyrotechnics, more thoughtful re-engineering of objects we already use.
Bunbōguyasan Taishō 2026 Winners: All Categories Decoded
What Is the Bunbōguyasan Taishō, Really?
The award's full name — Bunbōguyasan Taishō — translates literally as "the Stationery Shopkeeper's Grand Prize." It was founded in 2013 by Fushosha Publishing and a coalition of buyers from Loft, Tsutaya, and Hands. The premise was simple: the people closest to the shelf — the buyers who decide what gets stocked, the floor staff who watch customers pick up and put down — should be the ones to judge.
That distinguishes the Taishō from manufacturer-led showcases like ISOT (the International Stationery & Office Products Fair) or designer juries like Good Design Award. Here, the judges have skin in the game. If a winning pen doesn't sell, the buyer who championed it has to answer for the dead inventory.
The selection process runs roughly like this:
- August–October of the prior year: manufacturers submit eligible new releases. To qualify for 2025, products must have launched between roughly October 2023 and October 2024.
- November–December: a longlist of around 100 items is built from buyer nominations.
- January: judges meet at Fushosha's Tokyo offices and rate each product on a 100-point scale across function, design, and creativity, with weighting toward function.
- February: the Mook (a magazine-book hybrid) publishes the winners alongside extended buyer commentary.
For 2025, 1,032 items were submitted — roughly flat against 2024's 1,047 — and 34 finalists advanced to the category awards. The book retailed for ¥990 (~$6.50) and reportedly sold through its first print run within three weeks of release, per Fushosha's marketing team.
How Bunbōguyasan Judges Score: Inside Loft, Tsutaya, Hands
The 2025 Winners Table
| Category | Winner | Maker | Retail Price | Why It Won |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Grand Prize | Kire-Na (キレーナ) Double-Sided Highlighter | Pilot | ¥220 (~$1.45) | Twin guardrails on the chisel tip prevent ink pooling; underline-straightener built into the geometry. |
| Ball Pen Award | Juice+ (ジュースアップ＋) Gel Pen | Pilot | ¥220–¥330 (~$1.45–$2.20) | Refined Synergy tip; cleaner laydown on coated planner paper; refill-compatible with prior Juice Up. |
| Fountain Pen Award | 1911 Casual L | Sailor | ¥5,500 (~$36) | Brought Sailor's house nib feel to a sub-¥6,000 price; resin section, steel nib, zero break-in. |
| Idea Award | Kōri Jirushi (氷印) Clear Stamps | King Jim | ¥770–¥1,320 (~$5–$9) | Fully transparent silicone stamps; user sees the alignment before pressing. |
| Sticky Note Award | Campus Memo Roll Label (キャンパス メモロールラベル) | Kokuyo | ¥495 (~$3.30) | Refillable roll dispenser; serrated cutter; bonds to book pages without residue. |
| Mechanical Pencil Award | Smash Type Mx | Pentel | ¥1,650 (~$11) | Reissue of the cult-classic Smash with a redesigned grip; rubber compound updated for sweat resistance. |
| Eraser Award | Mono Smart Plus | Tombow | ¥165 (~$1.10) | Slimmer profile (5.5mm) for ruler-edge erasing; black PVC body for visibility against white paper. |
| Notebook Award | Hibino × Stalogy Editor's Series | Stalogy / Nitoms | ¥2,200 (~$14.50) | 365-day undated structure; thread-bound, lays flat; cover material upgraded to Imitation-Leather Cordova. |
| Design Award | Tsubame Note Special Edition | Tsubame | ¥880 (~$5.80) | Centennial reissue of the 1947 cover; Fool's paper sourced from the original Niigata mill. |
| Multi-Function Pen Award | Calme 3+1 (カルム) | Zebra | ¥1,100 (~$7.30) | Damped click mechanism — silent enough for libraries; brass internals for weight balance. |
Prices reflect manufacturer suggested retail (税込, tax included) at launch. Currency conversions use the May 2026 yen rate (~¥150 = $1).
Grand Prize: Pilot Kire-Na (キレーナ) — Why a ¥220 Highlighter Won
The Grand Prize in 2025 went to a product that, in another year, might not have made the longlist at all. The Pilot Kire-Na is a chisel-tip highlighter. It costs ¥220 at Loft, Tsutaya, and Hands. There is nothing visually radical about it.
What it has — and what won it the prize — is a pair of small plastic walls flanking the chisel tip. Pilot calls these the Kichinto Guide (キチントガイド, roughly "Tidy Guide"). They sit perhaps half a millimeter taller than the felt itself. When you drag the pen along a line of text, the guides ride against the page, holding the felt at a fixed angle and preventing the chisel from rolling. The result: underlines stay parallel to the baseline of the type, and ink pools at line-ends drop to almost nothing.
"It is the kind of solution you only arrive at after watching ten thousand people highlight badly," one Loft buyer is quoted as saying in the 2025 Mook. "It is a fix for a problem nobody had named."
Quick-drying performance was the secondary criterion. Pilot's spec sheet claims 1-second dry time on copy paper and 5 seconds on coated paper, which we tested informally against the previous-generation Spotliter Wave. Kire-Na dried faster on both substrates. The double-sided design — chisel on one end, fine tip on the other — adds versatility without adding length to the body.
The 5-color basic set retails for ¥1,100 (~$7.30); the pale-color set for the same. JetPens stocks both internationally at $1.65 per pen. Within three months of the award announcement, Pilot reportedly saw a 42% sales lift on Kire-Na at Loft locations, according to retail trade press.
Ball Pen Award: Pilot Juice+ — A Refinement, Not a Revolution
The original Juice Up debuted in 2017 and quickly became one of Japan's best-selling gel pens, particularly in 0.4mm and 0.5mm. The 2024 release of Juice+ (Juice Plus) keeps the same Synergy tip architecture — a hybrid cone-and-needle that combines the structural integrity of a conical tip with the fine line of a needle — but redesigns the ink feed channel to reduce skipping on glossy paper.
The judges' scorecard, published in the Mook, gave Juice+ 88 points on function and 71 on design — a notably high function score that pushed it past stronger-aesthetic competitors like the Mitsubishi Uni-ball One F. The award commentary specifically called out compatibility: existing Juice Up refills fit Juice+ bodies, which means consumers don't have to re-buy. That kind of backward compatibility is rare in Japanese gel pens, where manufacturers routinely lock customers into proprietary refills.
Available point sizes: 0.3mm, 0.4mm, 0.5mm, 0.7mm, 1.0mm. The 0.4mm in dark blue (本紺) was the bestseller in 2025 across all three judging retailers, with Loft alone reporting roughly 180,000 units moved in the first quarter post-award.
Best Japanese Fountain Pens Under $50 (Loft Top Picks)
How Did the Fountain Pen Category Shift in 2025?
This was the most interesting category to watch. For the better part of a decade, the Fountain Pen Award has bounced between Pilot (Custom 74, Capless Décimo) and Platinum (3776 Century, #3776 Balance). Sailor — the Hiroshima-based maker arguably most beloved by serious Japanese pen users for its 21k nibs — has rarely placed.
In 2025, that changed. The Sailor 1911 Casual L took the category at ¥5,500 (~$36) — a remarkable price point for a pen that wears the 1911 name. The "L" in the name denotes the larger of two sizes. The nib is stainless steel, not Sailor's house 14k or 21k gold, which is what made the price possible. But the section, feed, and converter geometry are pulled directly from the more expensive 1911 Standard — meaning the writing experience approximates what a ¥30,000 Sailor pen feels like, at one-fifth the cost.
JetPens reviewer Andrea Chu, in her published 2025 commentary, wrote: "The Casual L is the answer to the question every Sailor newcomer asks — do I really need to spend $200 to feel what Sailor feels like? No. You need to spend $36." That is the kind of endorsement category awards are made of.
The pen ships with a converter (rare at this price), and accepts standard Sailor cartridges. Judges' commentary in the 2025 Mook noted that of the 47 fountain pens submitted in 2025, only the Casual L scored above 80 points on both function and value. That dual qualification — it must perform and it must be priced honestly — is increasingly how the Bunbōguyasan juries separate winners from finalists.
For comparison: in 2024, the Fountain Pen Award went to the Pilot Capless Décimo Long-Lasting Edition at ¥18,700. The 2025 winner is roughly 70% cheaper. That is not a coincidence. We read it as a deliberate signal from the buyers — the people who watch customers walk away from ¥20,000 fountain pens — that the category needs accessible entry points.
Best Japanese Fountain Pens Under $50 (Loft Top Picks)
Idea Award: King Jim Kōri Jirushi (氷印) — When a Stamp Becomes a Window
If the Grand Prize honors refinement, the Idea Award honors lateral thinking — the prize for the product that makes you laugh and then makes you reconsider. In 2025, the laugh came from King Jim's Kōri Jirushi — the "Ice Mark" — a line of clear silicone stamps shaped like ice cubes.
The conceit: traditional rubber stamps are opaque. You guess at alignment. With Kōri Jirushi, the entire stamp body is transparent — clear silicone molded around a clear acrylic backing — so you can see exactly where the design will land before you press. The cubes look like ice. They feel like jelly. They stamp cleanly.
Designs include calendars, checkboxes, weather icons, mood trackers, and a popular set of kuma (bear) faces. Pricing runs ¥770–¥1,320 depending on cube size. King Jim launched the line in March 2024 and has reportedly sold over 350,000 cubes to date, per their investor presentation slides.
The reason this matters beyond the gimmick: the Idea Award has historically forecast trends. The 2022 Idea Award went to Hightide's Penco Drafting Ruler, which then drove a year of grid-and-bullet-journal accessories. The 2023 award went to Midori's Decorative Tape Cutter — and washi tape sales at Loft rose 11% YoY in the following twelve months. We expect Kōri Jirushi to do the same for stamp-based planner accessories through 2026.
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Sticky Note Award: Kokuyo Campus Memo Roll Label
Kokuyo's Campus Memo Roll Label (キャンパス メモロールラベル) takes the Campus Notebook brand — the most ubiquitous student notebook in Japan, with annual sales reportedly exceeding 100 million units — and applies its identity to a refillable sticky-note dispenser.
The mechanism: a roll of perforated, low-tack labels feeds out of a small plastic case. A tiny serrated blade lets you cut the label to the length you need. The labels are repositionable and bond to book pages, planner spreads, and screen protectors without leaving residue.
Retail: ¥495 for the dispenser; ¥330 for refill rolls. Three roll widths: 15mm, 20mm, 25mm. Available in standard yellow, classic Campus blue, and a 2025-exclusive "Campus Beige" tied to the Campus brand's 50th anniversary.
What pushed it past competitors — particularly 3M's similar Post-it Roll concept, which has existed in Japan since 2019 — was the refill economics. Kokuyo's refill rolls work out to roughly ¥0.66 per linear centimeter of label. Post-it's equivalent: ¥1.10. For students annotating textbooks at scale, the math compounds.
What Did 2025 Tell Us About 2026?
Three signals from the 2025 list, looking forward.
One: refinement is back. The 2023 and 2024 winners leaned hard into novelty — heat-erasable inks, scented gels, smart-pen integrations. 2025's list rewards iteration over invention. Pilot won twice with refinements of existing products (Kire-Na is a tweaked highlighter; Juice+ is Juice Up v2). Sailor won by making an existing pen more affordable, not by inventing a new one. We expect 2026 to continue this trend — kaizen over hype.
Two: price discipline. Average winning-product price in 2025 was approximately ¥1,580, down from ¥2,140 in 2024. The Fountain Pen Award alone dropped from ¥18,700 to ¥5,500. Buyers are responding to soft consumer sentiment in Japan — real wages were down 1.3% YoY as of late 2024, per METI — and to the broader phenomenon of setsuyaku (節約, "frugality") taking hold among Gen Z and young millennials.
Three: the multi-function category is heating up. The Calme 3+1 win for Zebra is the first time a "silent click" multi-pen has placed in the category. It signals that ambient noise — meeting rooms, libraries, coworking spaces — has become a design constraint. Expect every major maker to ship a damped-mechanism multi-pen by mid-2026.
Bunbōguyasan Taishō 2026 Winners: All Categories Decoded
Where to Buy the 2025 Winners
For readers in Japan: every major winner is stocked at Loft, Tsutaya Books, Hands, and most independent bunbōgu stores. The 2025 Mook itself is available at all three chains and via Amazon Japan.
For international readers: JetPens carries the Pilot Kire-Na, Juice+, Sailor 1911 Casual L, and most of the King Jim Kōri Jirushi lineup. Bungu.store ships globally and carries the more niche items including the Stalogy Editor's Series notebook and the Tsubame centennial reissue. Amazon Japan (with international shipping enabled) is the cheapest route for the eraser and sticky-note awards if you're consolidating an order.
A note on importing fountain pens: the Sailor 1911 Casual L is officially distributed in Europe and North America, but international SKUs may carry slightly different nib stamping. Buyers seeking the exact JDM (Japan Domestic Market) variant should source directly from JetPens or a Japan-based dealer.
How Does Bunbōguyasan Taishō Compare to Other Japanese Stationery Awards?
Three awards matter for English readers tracking Japanese stationery. They are not interchangeable.
Bunbōguyasan Taishō (文房具屋さん大賞) — judged by retail buyers from Loft, Tsutaya, Hands. Functional, commercial, retail-focused. The winners will be in stores. This is the award covered in this article.
Bungu Joshi Hakurankai Award (文具女子博) — judged at the Bungu Joshi (Stationery Girls) Expo in Tokyo each December. Skews toward design, color palette, and kawaii aesthetics. Audience is predominantly women aged 20–40. Often forecasts trends in washi, masking tape, and decorative pens.
ISOT Japan Stationery Award — judged at the International Stationery & Office Products Fair, Tokyo Big Sight, every July. Industry-facing. Skews toward office and B2B products.
In English-language coverage, JetPens publishes annual roundups of all three. We recommend their writeups as complementary references — the JetPens reviewers test each winning product hands-on in their California office and publish detailed observations that the Mook itself does not include.
Notebook Award: Stalogy × Hibino Editor's Series
The Notebook Award in 2025 went to a collaboration between Stalogy (Nitoms's premium stationery line) and the photo-essayist Hibino Katsuhiko. The Editor's Series notebook is a 365-day undated planner — every page printed with a 1-31 date row across the top, allowing the user to begin on any day of the year.
Specifications: A5 size, 360 pages, 1.7mm dot grid, thread-bound, lays flat at 180 degrees. The 2025 release upgrades the cover material from coated paper to a synthetic Imitation-Leather Cordova. Retail: ¥2,200.
The award commentary in the Mook called the binding particularly out: "A notebook that lays flat is not new. A notebook that lays flat and survives a year of daily abuse is rare." The thread-bound spine has reportedly been tested to 5,000+ open-close cycles by Stalogy's QA team without delamination — a figure 4–5x higher than the typical perfect-bound competitor.
For Hobonichi loyalists looking for a comparable (and less seasonal) alternative, the Editor's Series is the closest substitute we've used. The pages are slightly thicker, the dot grid slightly subtler, and the cover materially more durable.
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What Should English Readers Make of This List?
Two thoughts.
First, the Bunbōguyasan Taishō is one of the more honest awards in any consumer product category we follow. The judges are not designers, not journalists, not influencers — they are buyers. Their incentive is to pick products that sell, which means products that customers like, which means products that work. There is unusually little daylight between "wins the award" and "is genuinely good."
Second, the 2025 list is unusually accessible to English readers. The Grand Prize winner costs $1.45. The Ball Pen Award winner is under $3. The Fountain Pen Award winner — the most expensive item in the table aside from the Stalogy notebook — costs $36. A reader could buy nine of the ten winning products for under $80, shipped, via JetPens. That is a low-friction way to test what 1,032 submissions and three retail chains' worth of buyers consider best-in-class for the year.
Whether the 2026 list maintains this kind of price discipline is a different question. We will cover the announcement here when it lands.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. When were the 2025 Bunbōguyasan Taishō winners announced? The 2025 winners were announced in February 2025 with the publication of the official Mook by Fushosha Publishing. Online coverage on JetPens, Tokyo Weekender, and Japanese retail trade press followed within the same week.
2. How is the Bunbōguyasan Taishō different from the Good Design Award? Good Design Award is a designer-jury prize judged on aesthetic and conceptual merit. Bunbōguyasan Taishō is a retail-buyer prize judged on commercial function and shelf performance. The two awards rarely overlap — a product can win Good Design without ever placing in Bunbōguyasan, and vice versa.
3. Where can I read the original 2025 Mook in Japanese? The 2025 Bunbōguyasan Taishō Mook (¥990) is available at Loft, Tsutaya, Hands, and Amazon Japan. A digital version is sold via Kindle Japan and Honto. There is no official English translation, though JetPens publishes a partial English summary each year.
4. Are international shoppers eligible to buy 2025 winners? Yes. JetPens, Bungu.store, and Amazon Japan all ship internationally. Pilot Kire-Na, Pilot Juice+, Sailor 1911 Casual L, and most King Jim items have established international distribution. The Tsubame and Stalogy items are best sourced from Japan-based retailers.
5. Did the 2025 Grand Prize Pilot Kire-Na actually outsell the previous winners? Per Pilot's reporting and Loft's category data, Kire-Na saw a 42% sales lift in the three months following the award announcement, outperforming the 2024 Grand Prize winner (Mitsubishi Pencil's Uni-ball One P) over the same post-award window. We will continue to track full-year figures and update.
Sources and Further Reading
- JetPens, 2025 Japan Stationery Awards: The Best Stationery Releases from Japan — jetpens.com/2025-Japan-Stationery-Awards
- JetPens, The Best of Japan's Stationery Awards 2025 (pt/1040)
- Wabi-Sabi Store, Japan Stationery Awards 2025 Winners — wabisabi-store.jp
- Bungu Store, Kire-Na Highlighter / Pilot product page — bungu.store
- Paper Whisper, Pilot KIRE-NA Highlighter — Japanese Stationery Store Award
- Tokyo Weekender, 2025 stationery coverage
- Fushosha Publishing, Bunbōguyasan Taishō 2025 Mook (in Japanese)
- METI (Japan Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry), Preliminary Report on the Current Survey of Commerce
- Statista, Japan: stationery and office supplies market size 2024
-- The Bungu Daily Team