Rollerball aluminum

Ohto has been in the market since 1929. The first ball point pen made in Japan was manufactured in 1949. Designed for domestic customers to produce an accurate "Kanji", the subsequent development also represented an advantage for those who wanted to enter their notes in Latin characters, by providing relatively more space for extensive comments and notes.

Its stroke is quite a bit more filigree than the mechanical pencil made by the same manufacturer: the refill, called "needlepoint" has a stroke width of only .35 mm. Due to the wrap-around construction of the ink refill it is also quite a bit more stable than a graphite lead and will not wear out while writing, making the pen mechanism that much simpler. But the barrel shares the same elegant design: at the top it is hexagonal and beginning in the area where it is held and continuing to the tip it becomes round, so the pen sits perfectly in the hand.

In China and Japan, the market share of fine-lead pens is far greater than elsewhere. The reason for this is that in other cultures, pens with line widths of 0.5 mm or even 0.35 mm are used primarily for drawings and precise construction plans. The characters commonly used in the Far East, however, turn even simple writing into filigree work, because they can consist of several individual strokes and must be put down precisely on paper even in small print in order to remain legible. Fine-lead pencils are therefore everyday products. The leading manufacturers offer small masterpieces which, despite their impressive mechanical sophistication, are surprisingly inexpensive as standard products manufactured millions of times over.