A couple of months ago, I went with my daughter and six-year-old grandson to the Kita-Boshi Pencil factory in eastern Tokyo [1]. He is a first-grader at a public elementary school in Yokohama, and he is learning to write using wooden pencils.

We had watched many times a similar video [2] showing pencils being made at the Kita-Boshi factory. The production line wasn’t operating the day we went, but we still got a full introduction to the history and manufacture of pencils from the company chairman [3], who is very enthusiastic about the pencil business. The other attendees were all elementary school children and their parents or grandparents.

There used to be dozens of pencil factories in Tokyo, but Kita-Boshi is one of the few remaining. The larger Japanese pencil brands, such as Tombow and Mitsubishi, now source most of their production from places like Vietnam or China.

We came back home with a bag full of Kita-Boshi pencils that I bought there. I don’t use pencils much myself anymore, but when I tried writing with them they felt smoother and easier to write with than the wooden pencils I used as a child in the U.S. sixty years ago.

[1] http://www.kitaboshi.co.jp/pencil-lab/

[2] https://youtu.be/Lk_57TP6RFk

[3] https://www.yomiuri.co.jp/local/tokyo23/feature/CO100007/202...

How do you go about scheduling a visit to a factory?