Tokyo International Pen Show

The Tokyo International Pen Show is a fair for pens, ink and paper held over three days each November at a trade centre in the Minato ward of Tokyo. Makers, shops and individual craftsmen take stands beside one another, and a good deal of what is sold is made in small numbers or one piece at a time. The 2026 show is the ninth, with more exhibitors than any before it.

Fountain pens are at the centre of it. Glass pens are sold too, and pens turned from wood, along with ink, notebooks, paper, leather cases and the tools a pen needs. Nib grinders work at the show, and so do bookbinders, letterpress printers and glass studios. About two hundred exhibitors take part, a growing number of them from outside Japan, and there are workshops and talks alongside the selling.

Rare pens and one-offs are what the queue forms for, and the early entry slots go first. Tickets are released at noon on 23 September, which is Fountain Pen Day in Japan.

The show also gives itself a theme each year, built around a family of penguins it uses as a mascot. For 2026 the penguins are holding an antique market, selling off what they collected on an earlier round-the-world theme.

The show is built on a play on words. Kaku in Japanese means both to write and to draw, and the organisers set the fair around three things that go with it: what you write with, what you write on, and the colour you write in.

Behind that is a plain aim. People type now and write by hand less, and the organisers want the habit passed on, to children as much as to adults. From 2025 the show has also invited visitors of seventy and over in free on the last day, with people in mind who used a fountain pen once and have not picked one up in years.