The Japanese nail clipper you suddenly didn’t need to go to Japan to buy

A decade ago, with 1,700 yen to blow at the Narita airport, Jason Chen, the former Strategist deputy editor who became a Wirecutter editor in 2019, picked up a pair of Green Bell nail clippers. “The Green Bell slices through nails like a Santoku through a tomato. Makes sense, given that they were made in Seki, the city famed throughout Japan for creating Samurai swords,” he wrote. “The Japanese clippers, as you’d expect from a country that’s always elevated the mundane with powerful design, have a pleasing frosted-Champagne finish and the serious weight of a small stapler.” What was perhaps less expected was the fact that no flight to Tokyo was required to pick up a pair — they were already available on Amazon. “I was super surprised,” says Chen. “I thought they were a Japan-only thing.”

While that discovery might not seem very exciting now, back then, there was a certain rush to finding international products online for the first time. Items you once had to beg your friend to bring back in their carry-on — French moisturizers, Korean sunscreens, Japanese notebooks — were now available to ship from halfway across the world. Chen also discovered a windproof, lopsided Dutch umbrella in Amsterdam that is almost impossible to blow inside out. Then our global finds kept coming. A nifty collapsible Midori pen, tubes of Biafine and Homeoplasmine and A313, our beloved Hobonichi Techo. That little thrill of discovery was like wandering the aisles of a grocery store or beauty-supply shop abroad, and adding a bottle of Nuxe’s dry oil to your late-night toilet-paper order made you feel like a citizen of the world. It also made all of us realize just how small the world was becoming.

“Ten years later, I’m still a devotee,” adds Chen of his nail clippers. “I have three of them now: one in each bathroom and another for my travel dopp.” Because traveling is still fun (even if you don’t need to schlep souvenirs back anymore). —Dominique Pariso, Strategist senior writer