Nakaya

Nakaya was founded in 1999 by Toshiya Nakata, president of Platinum Pen Co., Ltd., who set out to preserve a craft Platinum's own mass production had left behind: hand-lacquered urushi fountain pens turned and finished one at a time. The trade name reaches further back still, to the Nakaya Manufacturing Company of 1924, Platinum's own predecessor — so the shop's name is not a borrowed flourish but the company's actual point of origin. Nakaya operates from Higashi-Ueno in Tokyo's Taito-ku, and by its own account began business together with veteran craftsmen who had already spent more than forty years working urushi at Platinum before the new company gave them a workshop built entirely around that skill.

The pens are built on ebonite bodies and finished in traditional Japanese lacquer techniques — maki-e gold and silver inlay, layered tame-nuri, raised takamaki-e relief, shell-inlaid raden, pear-skin-textured nashiji — each requiring repeated coats and weeks of curing before a barrel is considered finished. Nakaya makes pens to order rather than to stock: buyers choose ebonite or titanium construction, a lacquer finish, and a nib the company tunes against a study of the individual's own handwriting, with after-sales tuning available once the pen is in use.

There is no walk-in showroom in the Western retail sense — Nakaya sells through a network of authorized retailers listed on its own site — but the workshop's identity is unmistakable: a small group of lacquer specialists making pens the old way, at the address where Platinum's own pen-making lineage effectively continues under a different name.