Mitsubishi Pencil Uni

The uni is a Japanese graphite pencil: a hexagonal wooden stick lacquered a deep wine-maroon of its own, its end dipped in black, with the legend MITSU-BISHI and uni stamped in gold along one face. It is sold by the dozen in a hinged plastic case with an eraser, in seventeen grades from 9H to 6B, and is meant for anything from school exercises to technical drawing and sketching.

Its origin, as Mitsubishi Pencil tells it, lies in a tour of Europe and America in 1953 by its head of engineering, Yōji Suhara, who found Japanese pencils held in low regard abroad. The company spent about five years refining its graphite and clay into finer, more even particles, and in October 1958 launched the uni at 50 yen, the price of an imported pencil, when an ordinary one cost 5 to 20. The industrial designer Yoshio Akioka, who had shaped a celebrated express train, led the design: he chose the colour, between the traditional enji and ebicha, and drew the rounded logotype, named after the word unique.

The pencil sold beyond expectation. Its plastic dozen case, which had a sharpener built in, became something schoolchildren longed to own and carry as a pencil box, and Mitsubishi redesigned it in 1965, 1971 and 1989. A finer Hi-uni followed in 1966 as a separate pencil. The uni name spread across the company's products until it came to stand for Mitsubishi Pencil itself.

The pencil has changed little. The maker says only that the words Super Drawing on the barrel have become ESTABLISHED 1887, the year the company was founded, and that a barcode has been added; the range of grades has grown from the original 4H to 4B. In 2026 the case began to give way to a box of card and moulded pulp.