Samurai in the field would have to send reports back, so there was a special drawer in their arrow quivers for holding brushes, ink sticks and a grindstone. The grindstone got a special name, yatate or "arrow stand". It was a lot to carry.

 

Then one day, someone came up with the idea of soaking a bit of cotton or silk with ink - this let them carry the ink safely without worrying too much about spills. The first case, hiogi-gata, look like a fan that had been folded up. Move the lid aside and you had your brush and your ink pot. And samurai, having no other place to put it (no pockets, remember), kept on shoving them in the quivers so they too became known as "yatate". But the ink pots were small. As they became more popular, so too was the demand for larger ink pots.

 

This led to a dipper-shaped yatate with the bamboo brush stored neatly in the neck, and a large lidded pot for the ink soaked cotton. This was perfect for shoving in your obi, a wonderful portable writing set you could take anywhere. Some were big enough to hit people with (handy when you don't have a sword to hit someone back with). Some held tiny tools like tweezers or small knives.