Okay, not really. The title fulfills my April Fools’ quota of the day (I hate April Fools), but the rest of this is legit.

16-year-old Ryuki Omura was crowned Sunday as Japan’s first pen-spinning champion in a nationwide contest sponsored by the Pen Spinning Association Japan. Omura’s penjitsu (as I shall now and forever refer to the sport) was mightier than 16 other finalists chosen from 276 video entries.

Takara Tomy, who managed to keep Transformers alive and kicking in Japan while we forgot about them until recently, hopes to get in on the ground floor of penjitsu with its new Pen’z Gear line of specialty pens. They’re a bit longer and specially weighted for maximum jutsu.

For some truly amazing examples of this penjitsu, check out the PSAJ’s website. And look, I found an interview with the PSAJ on the YouTube (it’s in Japanese so someone is going to have to translate for us *cough* Pocky *cough*). My favorite bits are towards the end where they grab a high speed video camera to record the penjitsu action.

Congrats to Omura. I’m hoping to see more penjitsu state side. I’m willing to be we’ll be seeing lots of penjitsu this summer during the anime con season.

[Via Reuters]

Share This

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 at 11:20 am and is filed under Toys, The Future. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.