Pentel (ぺんてる)

The name contracts "pen" and "pastel". Founded in 1946 in a ruined Japan, Pentel produced a run of inventions that became categories: the Sign Pen in 1963, the first fibre-tip stable enough for writing — Lyndon Johnson ordered crates of them for the White House — then the first mechanical pencil with automatic lead advance.

The firm kept a foot in traditional tools with the Brush Pen, a reservoir brush that puts calligraphy in a pocket with no inkstone and no grinding. That continuity, from brush to technical marker, is what sets Pentel apart from its strictly Western competitors.