Over the years, OHTO has been prolific in releasing numerous obscure, flawed-yet-strangely compelling designs. Amongst these, I present the ROKKAKU SP-700R, paired here with a Pentel Hexreform Energel pen.
The ROKKAKU lives up to its name, which in Japanese means ‘6-sided’ or ‘hexagonal’. The cherry on top is that it is a capped mechanical pencil, which is a sub genre all by itself.
I remember first reading about the Kerry on Dave’s Mechanical Pencils all those years ago, and immediately getting bit by the bug. I soon discovered the Zoom 505, the Uni Pure Malt Premium Edition, and… several flaky designs by OHTO like the SP-10A Words, SP-15F Spirit and the TASCHE/Muji compact MP.
While the Kerry perfected the joining of the cap-pass through button design, almost everyone else went for the lazy solution: Just post the cap onto the main button and move the whole cap. Tombow did this, and so did OHTO. The exception was Uni, whose Pure Malt and P-Jack most closely followed the brilliance of the Kerry.
The thing about capped MPs up to this point was that you could operate it even if you do not post the cap. Well, OHTO had other ideas with the ROKKAKU…
If you don’t post the cap on the ROKKAKU, your finger tips simply could not depress the flush-fitted ‘button’ enough to advance any lead. Which wouldn’t be an issue if the posted pencil wasn’t so comically long at 16.5cm.
The way the stainless tube on the cap slips into the barrel at either end is so odd. Ohto paints themselves into so many weird technical design corners but does not back down.
Cool! Always enjoy your posts Kelvin ! You usually come up with something interesting. I’ve learned a lot from them.
I’d long considered TOMBOW the king of oddity brands, producing some truly bizarre and frankly comical writing instruments that at first look like they’d be terrible to use beyond a short few moments. But even the La Nave Oceanic with its bulbous fish shape is actually fun to use. I held one a very long time ago… probably late 1990’s when I saw it in a shop. I think it was close to $40 USD then, but in a shop that usually marks up prices. I test drove it on some paper and almost bought it, but balked. I wish I’d picked up one on the heels of discontinuation, as I’m sure some bargain prices were had (I’d heard as low as $20 USD).
But OHTO is the Duke of Oddity, in my book. Some curiously unusual pens and pencils… but TOMBOW still wins the race.
Very cool that Google Translate immediately picks up on the phonetic “ROKKAKU” and returns “hexagonal” in the English translation. So curiously weird how the pencil is long enough to use uncapped, but can’t lead advance without the cap… which is forced to dock abutted, not inserted, resulting in that weird 16.5 cm length. But if it’s not terribly heavy, could still be an enjoyable writing experience.
I took a look around and the only reference I can find is Kelvin’s post on Twitter (X)! So strange. It must be a long discontinued model, or was made for a very narrow market for a short time.
Maybe Kelvin knows more … I bought my ROKKAKU from running production, but it is a few years ago. So it is discontinued for some years, and it was definitely a low-volume product (Japan only I guess, and not produced many years).
Most of the links on that archive webpage are still valid, you should be able to find other pages of mp, and website for bp, and archived web catalog of other years
Do you feel anything wrong? Well, for me, I just can’t understand what went wrong with their pricing strategy during that period. PM-1000S, OP-1000 and OP-1000M are all 1000 yen, Flat-C and nbp-1000m are both 1000 yen, For what? (In same time same year!)
I totally believe that Flat-C has a quality of at least 2000 yen (although it’s not perfect, I don’t like the feeling when pressing the clip), while nbp-1000m is okay level for 1000 yen. As for those 3 mps, I think I don’t need to explain here. Or, isn’t this an opportunity to create a price gradient where, functionally speaking, OP-1000 is exactly the lower level version to PM-1000S, but with a same price?
