Pen spinning is the art of spinning a pen around your fingers and doing amazing tricks with it, and J-List has recently added a line of specially weighted spinning pens to our site for you to check out. The unique activity of twirling a pen is thought to have originated in Japan with ronin, a word which once meant a masterless samurai but in modern days refers to a student who has failed his university entrance exams and must live in limbo as he studies to take the tests near year. Since these students had plenty of free time, they’d get really good at spinning their pens in their fingers while they studied. The First Pen Spinning Boom got underway in Japan around 1976, when students of several famous national and private universities became known for the ability to spin pens. It was later learned that all these students had attented a yobiko (cram school) called Sundai Preparation School, which soon became legend among “spinners” for birthing the sport. In 1997 a pen spinning fan named Hideaki brought spinning to the Internet age with the first website dedicated to the activity, which ushered in the Second Wave of Pen Spinning. The Third Wave arrived with the defining of the various pen spinning tricks (backaround, infinity, palm spin and so on — they are frankly over my head, although they look cool) and the rise in pen spinning internationally in the form of world tournaments. How long will it be before Electronic Arts comes out with Extreme Pen Spinning for the Playstation 3? I’ll let that be a question for the ages.
