Tokumatsu Ishida, who first succeeded in producing a steel-pen top in Japan, in 1897, established zebra. Ishida’s philosophy was ‘doing my best for the good of the world and rendering service to the people’.

The origin of the name ‘Zebra’ is the characteristics of zebras. Zebras are quite genial animals and each zebra does not have a means of protecting itself from enemies. Thus, they always unite their efforts and protect each other.

Ishida wished that his employees would strongly united and improve stationery for the purpose of Japan’s cultural growth.

The trademark of Zebra is the illustration of a zebra, which is looking back, in a circle. The logo represents the Analects of Confucius ‘onkochishin,’ which means ‘learn from the past and develop new ideas and find new possibilities in the future’ and the circle symbolized the people’s network.

Thanks to such a strong unity between employees, Zebra overcame a variety of difficulties including being totally destroyed by a major air raid during the Second World War and has been establishing innovative stationery ever since. For instance, they succeeded in developing a high-quality preservative ink for a ballpoint pen in 1959, launched a ballpoint pen called ‘crystal’ which has a skeleton body so you can see how much ink is left (1966) and in 1981 developed the first system in the world named ‘twin-ball system’ to prevent the reflux of the ink in a ballpoint pen.