A Pilot Kokkokai maki-e pen dated 12 November 1978, Showa 53, never inked in forty-seven years. This is a rare survival from the early period of the Kokkokai's production, predating the systematic international awareness of Japanese luxury pen craft by more than a decade. By Hyakusen Murata

The decoration represents take (竹), bamboo, rendered in polychrome maki-e: realistic green tones with gold highlights on deep black urushi. This chromatic choice is the defining quality of the piece and its most unusual characteristic. The dominant production mode of the Kokkokai in the 1970s used gold powder on black urushi, a technique of great depth and elegance but limited in its colour range to the tonalities of metal and lacquer.

Representing bamboo in its actual green required the preparation of pigment-loaded urushi layers, a distinct manufacturing stage that added complexity and time to the production. The willingness to do this for a pen of this period indicates a specific ambition: the decoration was not designed to suggest bamboo through gold allusion but to show it in its own colour.

The result is a decoration that reads as a painting within the lacquer, not merely as a gilded ornament. Bamboo in its natural state is one of the four foundational subjects of classical Japanese decorative art. Its symbolism is constructed around paradox: it bends under snow without breaking, combining flexibility with structural integrity. Its hollow stems are associated with the Buddhist notion of emptiness. Its persistent green through all four seasons makes it an emblem of longevity and constancy.

These qualities have made it one of the most continuously represented motifs in Japanese lacquerwork since the Heian period.

The pen body, lacquer and nib are in exceptional condition. The original paulownia boxis intact.