As winter slowly sets in, Scribo takes another journey to the Land of the Rising Sun, announcing its latest limited edition and marking a new chapter in its collaboration with urushi artist Takeshi Matsuyama. Inspired by one of the most poetic motifs in Japanese culture, the Three Friends of Winter: pine, bamboo, and plum, the new La Dotta Bamboo is the first of three limited editions that will give fans and collectors another reason to write.
Although some might consider it just another limited edition, for Scribo it represents a three-year exploratory journey, an effort to capture the essence of Japanese culture that reflects a level of commitment few brands are willing to make. The Bologna-based brand thus brings together material, craftsmanship, and symbolism in an instrument created to serve handwriting. La Dotta Bamboo embodies resilience, the ability to bend without breaking, captured in lacquer, gold, and time.
The Symbolism of Bamboo at the Heart of the Pen
In Japanese tradition, bamboo carries profound symbolism, often regarded as a moral compass, capable of bending under pressure yet refusing to break. Much like those who are ready to adapt to new situations while remaining true to themselves and persevering. When I look at the design Scribo has infused into this edition, it is precisely this symbolic language that speaks directly to the soul of La Dotta Bamboo. Not through obvious decorations, but through restraint, balance, and surface tension.
Urushi as a Dialogue With Time
To bring the La Dotta Bamboo edition to life, Scribo collaborated with Takeshi Matsuyama, a master urushi artist born in Yamanaka and raised among lacquering tools, pigments, and silence. His dedication to the ancient urushi technique transcends pure craftsmanship, as he approaches his work from a spiritual perspective. For Matsuyama, urushi has always been a dialogue with time, a process in which patience is essential.
Each pen undergoes a slow ritual of successive lacquer layers—applied, left to cure in carefully controlled humidity, then applied again—until depth, texture, and durability emerge naturally. It is this patient accumulation of material that lends the pen its understated authority.
The surface is finished using the Ishime technique, creating a stone-like texture inspired by the hardness of winter earth—tactile, matte, and subtly influencing the writing experience. Over this restrained landscape, the bamboo motif is drawn using Maki-e, with gold and silver powders embedded into fresh lacquer, layer by layer. The result does not read as decoration, it reads like an ideogram, a natural sign formed over time.
Even the nib carries a subtle detail: an engraving dedicated to bamboo, visible only to the writer. A discreet symbol of good fortune. A reminder that power can remain private.
Art in a 68-Pen Limited Run
La Dotta Bamboo is strictly limited to 68 individually numbered pieces, with each progressive number pantograph-engraved on the ring of the filling system, together with the name “Bamboo Limited Edition.”
The signatures of Takeshi Matsuyama and Scribo are engraved on the cap, with Scribo’s name rendered in katakana, a formal acknowledgment of the collaboration between Italian manufacturing and Japanese lacquer tradition.
The presentation process continues after production. Each pen is housed in a handmade wooden box secured with a traditional Japanese cord and enclosed in a kimono-fabric pouch, ensuring physical protection and material continuity with the object itself.
“LA DOTTA Bamboo presents itself as an invitation to begin the new year with clarity, resilience and inner momentum. It is the opening of a trilogy that already hints at its next two editions: Pine and Plum, emblems of timeless and ever-shifting virtues,” says Scribo.