What will the Japanese think of next? Pen spinning is the latest “sport” to take Japan by storm, and why not? The only equipment needed for Japanese pen spinning is, well, a pen. Even a pencil will do work in a pinch.

Pen spinning is especially popular among the “ronins,” which are recent high-school graduates who have taken a year off before starting college in order to discover who they are and what they want to do with their life. Pen spinning, like any other repetitive action, is no doubt conducive to the deep thought required at such a time in life.

What exactly is pen spinning? Pen spinning, also referred to as “pen tricks” is actually something you’ve probably done at some point in your life, perhaps when you were sitting in class bored. Consider it to be a variation on twiddling your thumbs, but with a lot more potential. Pen spinning is a form of contact juggling that simply involves moving a pen between the fingers and thumb, at an impressive rate of speed.

Before it had a name, and before it became a craze, it showed up in various movies such as Top Gun, most often as an idiosyncratic habit of one of the characters. There are the knuckle crackers, the thumb twiddlers, and yes, the pen spinners.

As an updated version of an old saying goes, a video is worth a million words, so the best way to get a glimpse of what the pen spinning craze is all about, take a look at this video: www.5min.com/Video/The-art-of-Japanese-pen-sp .

Of course, Westerners don’t want to be left out of any craze, so Bic has developed its very own “Pen Spinning Academy.” You can visit their site here(www.penspinningacademy.com/en/index.html), where you can learn the basics of pen spinning, watch demonstrations, and even learn pen spinning lingo such as, “cop” (center of pen), “fingerless” (tricks that don’t use fingers, but only movement of the wrists to move the pen), and “cog” (center of gravity).

If you decide to take up pen spinning and want to converse with other pen spinners, you might want to check out this forum learn the ins and outs of this interesting “sport.”

If you’re looking for a new hobby, that won’t cost you an arm or a leg and that you can do just about anywhere, consider developing the fine art of pen spinning.