Hanko seal with 87 carved characters

This one's especially for @nice gaijin:

A Shimane-based artisan team crafted a regular-sized hanko seal (about 1.2 centimetres in diameter) with 87 (!) letters. That leaves a space of just one square millimetre for each character.

The corporate client's 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."

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The seal shown above is priced at 5,500 JPY ($42), including tax. The 108-character "seal for Jugemu's exclusive use" (see article) comes at 19,800 JPY. It is available here:


Since Kono Taro declared his Digital Revolution, the seal industry has been in dire straights. With this fantastic piece of a seal, the hanko shop hoped to show off the high technological calibre of its artisans and arouse interest in seals.