Hello, I’m new here so I’m not sure if this is the correct place to make this topic so correct me if I’m wrong.
I’m hoping to find some information on a Japanese brand called アスター or ASTER.
I recently found someone selling a few of them and it’s a brand I had never before heard of or seen anywhere.
No searching or asking around yielded any results either so it seems to be an older rather unknown manufacturer who probably either never made it out of Japan or was too unknown for anyone who owns them to care or remember that they do.
The singular result on google that came up for it was from this Japanese blog:
They appear to be in the same state of confusion about where they could have come from.
Their one point of connection was a pelikan blog post from July 5th 2009.
Although the models that appear in it bear the name written vertically as ASTER, the models I saw have it in Japanese so they might even be unrelated.
The post seems to be about a local meetup and purchase/haul, here is translation I was able to get from google on what they have to say about ASTER:
https://imgur.com/a/pybiUhl
And lastly here are the ones that I stumbled on:
Someone else I inquired about them mentioned that these designs appear to copy the Pentel s55 and Pentel Excalibur.
So what kind of brand was ASTER?
Were they just a knockoff manufacturer that never went out of obscurity?
Does anyone have any experience or familiarity with them?
I would love to hear it because I couldn’t find anything anywhere at all.