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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 publi

by tkgally 2mo ago

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/ http://www.kitaboshi.co.jp/pencil-lab/ [2] https://youtu.be/Lk_57TP6RFk https://youtu.be/Lk_57TP6RFk [3] https://www.yomiuri.co.jp/local/tokyo23/feature/CO100007/20260507-GYTAT00148/ https://www.yomiuri.co.jp/local/tokyo23/feature/CO100007/202...

gfrecvh 2mo ago
How do you go about scheduling a visit to a factory?
- tkgally 2mo ago
  The details are all on that first page [1] in Japanese. Try asking an LLM for a translation. The page says to contact the factory by either email or fax (!) to reserve a spot. If you write to them in English, I suggest you preface it with a translation of your message in Japanese by ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. If you prompt the LLM with an explanation of how you plan to use the text you want translated, it should produce a decent translation. The explanations at the factory were entirely in Japanese, and I doubt if any interpreting is available. The chairman did tell me, though, that they get occasional visitors from outside Japan, and he seemed to welcome them. [1] http://www.kitaboshi.co.jp/pencil-lab/ http://www.kitaboshi.co.jp/pencil-lab/

by tkgally 2mo ago

gfrecvh 2mo ago

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

tkgally 2mo ago
The details are all on that first page [1] in Japanese. Try asking an LLM for a translation. The page says to contact the factory by either email or fax (!) to reserve a spot. If you write to them in English, I suggest you preface it with a translation of your message in Japanese by ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. If you prompt the LLM with an explanation of how you plan to use the text you want translated, it should produce a decent translation. The explanations at the factory were entirely in Japanese, and I doubt if any interpreting is available. The chairman did tell me, though, that they get occasional visitors from outside Japan, and he seemed to welcome them. [1] http://www.kitaboshi.co.jp/pencil-lab/ http://www.kitaboshi.co.jp/pencil-lab/