MATSUE—A company employee’s request to artisans for a project to promote their struggling industry was met with incredulity.

“This has never been done before,” they said.

The employee had held up a sheet of paper with 80 characters of text, including numbers, kanji, hiragana and katakana.

She wanted the workers to carve all 80 characters on one personal “hanko” seal that was only 1.2 centimeters across, smaller than a 1-yen coin.

DECLINING TRADITION

The seal manufacturing industry has been facing an uphill battle since autumn 2020, when Taro Kono, then state minister in charge of administrative reform, said the government was moving to eliminate hanko requirements from administrative procedures.

“I frankly thought that we would all be jobless,” the employee at Nagae Inshodo, a seal manufacturer based in Matsue, the capital of Shimane Prefecture, said about Kono’s comment.

She was in charge of social media at the company.

Hanko stamps have been used widely in Japan to officially sign documents. It is a cultural tradition that dates back hundreds of years.

But the hanko requirement at the government level has led to excessive paperwork and has been singled out as an obstacle to digital procedures and teleworking.

Founded half a century ago, Nagae Inshodo has about 60 workers on its payroll.

Soon after Kono’s remark, the social media manager watched the company’s workers create a seal ordered by a corporate client. It was a particularly tough job because they had to fit a lengthy department name into the small surface of the hanko.

Amazed by the delicate procedures to produce such tiny characters, she came up with an idea: “Maybe we should show off the high technological caliber of our workers to a broad audience to arouse interest in seals and advertise our company.”

She summoned the workers and said: “I have a favor to ask you. Please don’t say ‘no.’”

She then showed them the paper with the 80 characters.

Naoki Murao, one of the workers, said he initially felt embarrassed by the request.

The longest corporate seal that he had made earlier contained about 40 letters. Attempting 80 characters on a seal was stepping into unknown territory.

“Carving out the letters is not the end of the story,” Murao, 48, said. “A seal can only be called a seal when the characters are legible in its impression. We were concerned we may not be able to do that.”

However, the artisan spirit of the workers soon took over.

“Although we were unsure if we could succeed, we decided to give it a shot,” Murao said. “We also had the mettle as artisans who had made so many seals earlier.”

ONLY 1 MM SQUARE PER CHARACTER

Six skilled workers teamed up for the task, including a designer who used a computer to map out optimal positioning of the characters, and an engraving machine operator.

The team worked on the project in their spare time.

They found they needed to fit a single character into an area of only about 1 millimeter square.

But the mix of characters meant that some letters required slightly different line thicknesses and engraving depths. The decimal number “1.2,” for example, also had to be squeezed in the space for a single character.

The workers used a special engraving machine and two types of needles with different thicknesses to carve the letters.

After many failures through trial and error, they finally completed the mission after a full day’s work.

And they had room to spare.

The Japanese text engraved on the seal roughly translates as follows:

“Hello. We are from a small hanko shop in Shimane Prefecture, and we are pushing the limits on how many characters we can put on a seal that measures only 1.2 cm. We have tried our hand at 87 letters this time around. They are clearly legible here, aren’t they? This shows what we can do with our artisan skills! Isn’t this great?”

The social media manager, in fact, had requested “only” 80 characters.

Murao and his colleagues added the final seven characters for “Isn’t this great?” out of a sense of pride.

The workers were able to read the text clearly when they applied the seal on paper.

“I felt so proud,” Murao said.

A photo showing the seal’s impression beside a 1-yen coin was released on Nagae Inshodo’s official Twitter account, along with a caption saying, “We have carved out this terrific one.”

The tweet quickly gained more than 220,000 likes.

In another, more substantial benefit, the company began seeing an increase in orders for seals.

“We had never thought we would get so much attention,” Murao said.

BREAKS CENTURY MARK

Although the project proved a public relations success, the workers were not finished showing off their skills.

Company officials spotted a tweet that said, “Why don’t you have a try at Jugemu?”

Jugemu refers to a classic number in “rakugo” comic storytelling. A couple looking to give their newborn son a name that will lead to a long life end up linking together many lucky words, resulting in an extra-long name containing 108 characters.

Although the difficulty level was raised significantly, the hanko workers were fired up. Their enthusiasm grew, and they became even more united.

The 108-character name was engraved on a seal.

“We ourselves were surprised to find that the text was so distinctly legible (in the impression),” Murao said.

The company’s Twitter account received a host of laudatory comments for the second feat.

“So, you have outdone what you did last time,” one tweet said.

“I see how beautifully the letters are positioned,” said another.

A company representative refused to let an Asahi Shimbun reporter view the production process for that seal, saying, “Oh no, it’s all about trade secrets.”

When asked if the hanko artisans would attempt to best their latest feat, Murao said, “Now that we have come this far, I really hope we will try and see how far we can still go.”

The “seal in question,” as the company calls the 87-character product, is priced at 5,500 yen ($42), including tax. The 108-character “seal for Jugemu’s exclusive use” is available for 19,800 yen, including tax.

Both can be ordered on Nagae Inshodo’s website (https://www.nagae-hanko.com/).