New hire, first week, desk buried in paperwork. "Does anyone have a stapler I could borrow?" Blank looks all round.
A colleague tries again, more helpfully, holding one up: "Kore, hotchikisu."
"Hotchkiss?" The new hire turns the word over like it should mean something. It does. It's just not a word for anything in particular — it's somebody's last name.
The everyday Japanese word for the device that joins sheets of paper with a bent metal pin is not a translation of "stapler" at all. It's ホッチキス, hotchikisu — a straight transliteration of the English surname Hotchkiss. The actual English word, ステープラー (sutepuraa), does exist in Japanese, but it mostly shows up in instruction manuals or on heavy-duty staple guns. Ask an office for a sutepuraa and you'll get a slightly longer pause than you were expecting, followed by someone handing you a hotchikisu anyway.
The reason traces to a single shipment. In 1903 (Meiji 36), the Tokyo stationery dealer Itoki Shoten — the company known today as Itoki — imported Japan's first paper-fastening machines of this kind from the United States. The model was the "No. 1 Paper Fastener," made by the E.H. Hotchkiss Company of Norwalk, Connecticut, a firm built up by a stationer named Eli Hubbell Hotchkiss, and the only Roman lettering stamped into its metal body read HOTCHKISS No. 1. A device with no Japanese name and exactly one word physically engraved on it was always going to end up being called that word.
A popular story on Japanese stationery blogs adds a flourish worth flagging as just that — a story: that the inventor was Benjamin Berkeley Hotchkiss, the far more famous Hotchkiss who designed the belt-fed Hotchkiss machine gun, and that he carried the ammunition-belt idea over into a device for feeding paper fasteners. It's a satisfying line, and it's mostly folklore. Benjamin Hotchkiss died in 1885, a decade before the No. 1 stapler was built, and the company behind it was run by Eli — who does appear to have been some kind of relative, a nephew by one account, though how close the connection really was isn't settled in anything written about it in English. The gun and the stapler share a surname. Whether they share much else is, at best, supposedly true.
Whatever the family tree actually looks like, the brand name and the object fused in Japan so completely that it never came back apart. Decades later, staplers made by Kokuyo, Max, Plus and every other manufacturer with no connection whatsoever to Connecticut are still sold, rung up and asked for as ホッチキス — one imported company's surname, doing the generic job, forever, for a market it never had to compete in.
English named this object by what it does — a stapler staples, plainly, end of story, no biography required. Japan named it after a person nobody there has ever met, purely because a crate that arrived at a Tokyo stationery shop in 1903 happened to have his name stamped on the only thing inside it in Roman letters. The useful word won in English. The human one won in Japan — by accident, off a label, and it has quietly outlasted every rival stapler brand that has tried to sell a hotchikisu-shaped object under any other name since.