Zebra Hi-Mckee

The Hi-Mckee is a Japanese permanent marker with a nib at each end. A fat cylindrical barrel, about 14 centimetres long, carries a broad chisel tip under one cap and a fine bullet tip under the other, each cap fitted to post on the opposite end. A band round the barrel is printed with a double-headed arrow, marked 太 (thick) at one end and 細 (fine) at the other, enclosing the name in katakana. The ink is alcohol-based and dries fast; Zebra lists paper, cloth, wood, cardboard, glass, plastic and metal among the surfaces it marks.

Zebra, the Tokyo pen maker, launched the Hi-Mckee in 1976 and describes it as the first twin-tip oil-based marker made in Japan. Japanese Wikipedia describes it as a rival to Magic Ink, the marker made by Teranishi Chemical. Japanese Wikipedia credits the product design to Hisatoshi Shibuya and the graphics to Yū Nakajima, both of Zebra. The name, Zebra says, is a coinage from the English word mark.

By the company's own account the pen sold badly at first: buyers did not grasp the convenience of two widths in one body. Zebra put posters in stationers' shops across Japan and ran television advertisements, one of which showed a thick marker and a fine one bound together with tape. Sales grew until the Hi-Mckee became, in Zebra's words, a marker found in every home. By the end of 2023 it had sold more than a billion.

The pen has since grown a family: a finer twin-tip, the Mckee Extra Fine, a refillable version in 2005, a retractable one in 2006. The original continues alongside them, in twelve colours at 165 yen, and Japanese Wikipedia observes that its design has barely changed since launch. In 2026, its fiftieth year, Zebra changed the packaging, not the pen.