Japanese Stationery and Pen Brands in Wholesale: Which Brands Reach the US, and How Many Items Each

Quick answer: If you source by brand name, the useful question is not which Japanese stationery brands are famous, but how many items each one has in a wholesale catalog and whether those items can be shipped to your country. Measured in the orosy catalog on 2026-10-16, a brand-name search returned 2,858 items for US delivery under KOKUYO, 1,020 under KING JIM, 1,009 under Sakura Color, 955 under Pentel, and 35 under Mitsubishi Pencil, the maker behind uni. The delivery country decides the catalog before any brand does: for US delivery the range is stationery only, 56,988 products on that date. This article is the brand-by-brand count behind our Japanese stationery wholesale guide, which covers choosing a sourcing route and planning the section.

Key takeaways

• Set your delivery country before you read any brand count. For US delivery the catalog is stationery only (56,988 products on 2026-10-16); for the UK, EU and twelve other destinations it is wider (98,890 products, the same figure for all fourteen), and a receiving point inside Japan opens the full catalog (203,818).
• Breadth by brand is uneven in a way the brand's reputation does not predict. KOKUYO returned 2,858 items for US delivery; Mitsubishi Pencil, the maker behind the uni and uni-ball lines, returned 35.
• A hit is not the same as a product from that brand, so the table counts both. The gap is small for ten of the eleven and large for one: ミドリ returns 132 items for US delivery, of which 20 carry MIDORI as the brand.
• The counts are text matches on product data, measured on one date. The spelling you type is part of the query: OHTO in Latin letters returns nothing, while オート returns 138 items, 130 of them OHTO's. A name can also land on items that are not that brand's, and listings change, so read the figures as the size of what you could order that day.
• A brand name is not a buying unit. The order unit is set per product and the minimum order amount is set per delivery group, so two brands with similar counts can still ask different things of a first order.
• None of these counts imply any appointment or approval by the brand. orosy does not claim one, and no part of this article should be read that way.

Your delivery country decides the catalog before any brand does

Most brand research runs in the wrong order: a buyer finds a list of Japanese pen makers, picks four, and only then discovers which of them can be shipped to the store. In a catalog with a delivery country setting the order reverses. The country narrows the catalog first, and every brand count you then read is a count inside that narrowed range, which also differs by destination. For US delivery the shippable catalog is stationery. For the United Kingdom, EU member states and a group of other destinations it also carries adult apparel and kitchen & dining products. Some goods sit outside the shippable range for every destination: liquids and sprays such as detergents, alcohol and oils, children's and baby clothing, and products whose classification is not yet settled.

Two practical notes follow. If you are a US stationery buyer, the first row is the whole range open to you, and the apparel and kitchen entries in the second row are not something you can plan against. If you already have a receiving agent or a warehouse inside Japan, the third column prices that arrangement in breadth: roughly three and a half times the number of products that can go directly to a US address.

Each figure was taken by querying the product search with the delivery country set and no search term, so it is the whole catalog for that destination on that date, not a sample.

Brand-name counts in the catalog, measured on 2026-10-16

Each figure is the number of products the search returned for the term in the second column, with the delivery country set, measured on 2026-10-16. The second column is there because the term is part of the result. Eight of the eleven are measured with the Japanese form of the name, which is the form the catalog carries; the three Latin spellings in the list return the same figure as the Japanese form, as does Tombow, which we show under the company name トンボ鉛筆 to keep it clear of the short form トンボ.

The fourth column is the check most brand lists skip. Every result carries a brand label of its own, so we read all the results back for each term and counted how many of them actually sit under that brand. For nine of the eleven terms the match is 97% or better. OHTO is 94%. One, MIDORI, is far off, and the table says so rather than leaving you to find out after you have planned a section around it.

The fourth column is for US delivery, but we counted the UK results the same way. Where the two columns differ, the number of items carrying the brand is identical: ゼブラ 625 in both, オート 130 in both, ミドリ 20 in both. The whole of the UK difference is extra text matches, not extra products from that brand.

The spread is what most buyers notice first. The top of the list is in the thousands, the bottom is in the dozens, and the ordering does not track how well known the brand is outside Japan. The next two sections are about what to do with that.

How to read these counts, and how not to

The method is simple enough to state in one line, which also means its limits are easy to state.

It is a text match on the product data, not a filter on the brand label. The brand label is in each result, but the search is not a filter on it: the keyword is matched against the product name, brand, model number, category and variation names together. So the Latin spelling and the Japanese one are two different queries rather than one query in two languages. On 2026-10-16, for US delivery: OHTO in Latin letters returned nothing at all, while オート returned 138, of which 130 carry OHTO as the brand; Mitsubishi Pencil returned 86 against 35 for 三菱鉛筆; MIDORI returned 96 against 132 for ミドリ. The Latin figure is not reliably the higher one, so do not treat it as an upper bound. Where a name is distinctive, such as KOKUYO or Pentel, both spellings land in the same place.

It is one date. Suppliers add and remove listings, so these numbers move. Nothing here claims a count will hold next month, and there is no before-and-after comparison, because one measurement does not support one.

One row needs reading before you use it. ミドリ returned 132 items for US delivery, but only 20 of them carry MIDORI as the brand. The word is both the color green in Japanese and a common personal name, so most of the rest are other makers' products: 46 from Sakura Color and 8 from Pentel where it is a color, and 29 from Hyogensha where it is the name of the illustrator the range is built around. MIDORI's own range in the catalog is the size of the 20, not the 132. This is the clearest case of what the fourth column is for.

It is a count, not a relationship. A large number next to a brand name means the catalog had that many matching items on 2026-10-16. It does not mean orosy is appointed or endorsed by that brand.

The US and UK columns differ for a reason worth understanding. Eight of the eleven brands return identical figures for both destinations, which is what you would expect for stationery items that can go to either place. Three do not: Zebra, OHTO and MIDORI all return more for UK delivery, and all three are terms that are also ordinary Japanese or English words. The likely cause is the first table rather than the brand: the UK catalog also carries adult apparel and kitchen & dining, so a text match on a short name has more places to land. We did not verify item by item which rows account for the difference, so this is an explanation of where the extra matches can come from, not a claim about what they are. For a stationery-only read, the US column is the cleaner one.

Product data comes back in Japanese. Whichever spelling of the name you search with, the product names and descriptions you get back are in Japanese. That matters for the step after sourcing: if you are merchandising in English, the translation work sits with you. The reverse of over-counting also happens: a Latin-letter term can return nothing at all even when the products exist. When that happens, search the Japanese word for the item instead.

A famous name is not a deep catalog, and that changes the buy

Put the two ends of the table side by side. KOKUYO, a company whose Campus notebooks are a fixture of Japanese school and office life, returned 2,858 items for US delivery. Mitsubishi Pencil, the maker behind the uni and uni-ball lines, returned 35.

A buyer who built a plan from a consumer brand roundup would expect those two to behave similarly, and they do not. A likely reason is distribution rather than quality or size. Brands with the widest international recognition tend to be the ones whose exports already run through established channels, which is why a US-based importer can supply them and why a catalog assembled from Japanese domestic wholesale supply does not need to carry much of them. The names that run deep in a domestic catalog are often the ones that never built an export path, because the domestic channel was enough. That is a reading of the pattern, not something these counts prove on their own.

That inverts the usual shopping instinct, and it has three consequences for a brand-first buyer.

Check the count before you promise a brand to anyone. A 35-item result is not a section; it is a few products. If a buying group, a store plan or a planogram is expecting a branded section, confirm the breadth exists before the plan hardens. Doing this in the opposite order is the most common way a brand-led plan stalls.

Use the thin counts as fill, not as anchors. Thirty-five items is useful access when you need two specific pens, and a poor base for a reorder program. Our stationery sourcing guide sets out the three-tier approach that decides which job each item does.

Read a deep count as a reason to stop brand-hunting. If one name returns over two thousand items that can be shipped to you, the next useful hour is not spent finding a second brand. It is spent inside that result set, because the choice problem has moved from which brands to which products.

The wider version of this point, about the layers between you and the maker and who decides what you get to see, is in our explainer on how Japanese wholesalers work.

From a brand name to an order: what you set up first

Brand counts tell you what exists. Four other settings decide what a first order looks like, and none of them are set per brand.

A delivery group is orosy's unit for products that ship together from the same source. Shipping fees, any free-shipping threshold and the minimum order amount are set per delivery group. The practical effect is that a cart spanning several sources has several of these thresholds to satisfy at once, and that a brand with a large item count can still sit behind a threshold you have not met. The vocabulary on a Japanese order form, including order unit and case pack, is unpacked in Japanese wholesale terms explained.

Before any of that, the account. The sign-up form has eight fields, including your company name, the URL of the business site you sell through, and what you sell. The URL is used to confirm you are a trading business, so a business selling only through a channel with no URL of its own is outside what this account can verify. Registration and use of the service cost nothing, and what you pay is the price of the goods and the shipping. A card is needed before you place a real order, not to open the account. Most accounts are approved within about 10 minutes if the sign-up email domain matches the business website or the email is listed on it; otherwise normally within 12 hours. While the account is under review you can search and place test orders in test mode, with nothing sent to any supplier, nothing shipped and nothing charged. Wholesale prices and live data open once the account is approved. As of 2026-09-28, over 476 businesses had signed up, over 307 had passed review, and over 48 had issued an API key.

Once the account is open, there are three ways to run the search described in this article, and all three read the same catalog and the same cart. The portal screen is where to start. For anything repeated, an AI client can do the searching: connect from an MCP-capable AI client that lets you set an Authorization header — Claude Code, for example. The agent searches, compares and builds the cart. It stops and shows you the order total, and you place the order. A direct API integration is the third way, and the one to reach for when the catalog feeds your own storefront or planning system. The three are compared in three ways to order, and production orders have come in through all three as of 2026-09-29. A home-and-garden online retailer in Germany went from sign-up to a first confirmed order in four days: it issued its own API key, pulled the catalog from an AI client, and confirmed the order on the portal screen. That sequence is written up in from sign-up to first order in four days.

Where orosy fits

orosy is a Japanese wholesale marketplace, founded in 2018, whose catalog is reachable through one account, one cart and one API. The name comes from the Japanese verb orosu (卸す), to wholesale. The marketplace has 5,000+ brands and suppliers, which join this API over time, so the counts above measure what a search returned on 2026-10-16 rather than everything on the marketplace. orosy carries the negotiation and the account opening with each supplier, so a basket spanning several of them is one cart and one invoice.

orosy arranges international shipping to your country. You do not need a forwarder or a receiving point in Japan. Before you order, the cart shows a reference figure for international shipping, for your information only. The actual shipping cost is calculated later and billed to you, and it can differ from that figure. Customs clearance in your country, import duties, and taxes at import are your responsibility. They are not part of the cost billed by orosy. Delivery to a receiving point inside Japan also remains available.

Two neighboring articles cover what this one does not. If you are still choosing between a US-based importer, a direct maker account, a trade fair and a buyer portal, start with the Japanese stationery wholesale guide. If you are comparing the online options, where to buy Japanese products wholesale online sets them side by side.

FAQ

Which Japanese pen and stationery brands show up in the orosy catalog for US delivery?

Measured on 2026-10-16, a brand-name search with the delivery country set to the US returned items under KOKUYO (2,858), KING JIM (1,020), Sakura Color (1,009), Pentel (955), Zebra (634), Tombow (587), Sailor (360), OHTO (138), MIDORI (132), Platinum (117) and Mitsubishi Pencil, the maker behind uni (35). Eight of the eleven were searched with the Japanese form of the name, which is the form the catalog carries. One figure needs a caveat: of the 132 returned for ミドリ, only 20 carry MIDORI as the brand, because the word also means the color green. These are counts of what a search returns, not a statement about any relationship between orosy and the brand, and they move as suppliers change their listings.

How many Japanese stationery products can be shipped to the US?

56,988 products on 2026-10-16. For US delivery the catalog is stationery only, so that figure is the whole shippable range rather than a stationery slice of something larger. Set the delivery country first and the catalog narrows to what can go there, which is why the same brand name returns different totals for different countries.

Why does a brand return a different number of items for UK delivery than for US delivery?

Two reasons. The catalog for UK delivery is wider than the US one, because it carries adult apparel and kitchen & dining products alongside stationery, so a brand name can match items outside stationery. And the search is a text match on the product data, so a word like Zebra or MIDORI can land on items that are not that brand's. That happens inside the US column too: of the 132 items returned for ミドリ, only 20 carry MIDORI as the brand. The fourth column of the table is there to show it.

Does a large item count for a brand mean orosy is a distributor for that brand?

No. The counts describe how many items a search for that name returns in the catalog on a given date. They say nothing about any appointment, approval or exclusive arrangement with the brand, and orosy does not claim one. Treat the number as a measure of how much you could put in a cart that day.

Can I search the Japanese wholesale catalog by brand name?

Yes, and the exact term matters. The table lists the term used for each row, because the spelling changes the answer. Four names return the same figure either way (KOKUYO, KING JIM, Pentel and Tombow); the rest come from the Japanese company name, such as 三菱鉛筆 for Mitsubishi Pencil or セーラー万年筆 for Sailor. OHTO in Latin letters returns nothing at all. Product names and descriptions come back in Japanese either way, so plan for a translation step in your own workflow if you are merchandising in English.

What do I need before I can see wholesale prices for these brands?

A business account. The sign-up form has eight fields, including your company name, the URL of the business site you sell through, and what you sell, and the URL is used to confirm you are a trading business. Most accounts are approved within about 10 minutes if the sign-up email domain matches the business website or the email is listed on it; otherwise normally within 12 hours. While the account is under review you can run searches and place test orders in test mode, with nothing sent and nothing charged.

How the counts were measured

Every figure here comes from the orosy product search on 2026-10-16. Catalog totals were taken with the delivery country set and no search term. Brand figures were taken with the term shown in the table and the delivery country set, using the form of the name the catalog carries, which for eight of the eleven is the Japanese one. For the fourth column, every result for each term was read back and counted by the brand label on the result itself, for US delivery. Tombow is measured as the company name トンボ鉛筆 rather than the short form トンボ, which also means dragonfly and returns 595 for US delivery. They are text matches against the product data rather than a filter on the brand label, so a common word can over-count. Counts change as suppliers add and remove listings. No other source is cited because there is none: these are first-party measurements of one catalog on one date.