Japan 2024: Hunting for More Exclusive Inks in Tokyo, Part 1

My Ink Map: https://www.google.com/maps/d/edit?mid=1ZzIXCrNTQ1QWo2PVVgfTQ3GbP_hjhfU&usp=sharing

A couple of months ago, I went back to Japan to search for more rare and exclusive fountain pen inks! In this trip, I spent a lot less time in Tokyo and explored all over the country, and ended up finding some really interesting shops and inks. In this video, I’m just starting out in Tokyo, visiting Bungubox, Eslite Spectrum, Stationery Station, and Touch & Flow. I’ll wrap up Tokyo in the next video.

This is the first installment, and I think that they get better as I go along, but time will tell. I’ll be interrupting this series periodically with some fountain pen reviews, too.

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Hello again, I’m Matthew from thewetpen.com, and on a rainy afternoon in late February, I climbed aboard an ANA flight from Seattle to Tokyo, and I settled in for the 10 hour trip. I had a little bit of work to take care of for a few days in Yokohama, just south of Tokyo, but I extended the trip to a full three weeks so that I’d have some time to explore and to search for rare and exclusive inks. Like last year, my rule was to buy only inks from Japan that were exclusive to the store where I found them. If you saw my videos last year, you may remember that after spending some time in Tokyo, I made it down to Osaka and Kyoto, but didn’t get very far outside of that golden triangle. This time, after a few days in Tokyo, we took a train all the way down to the western end of the country on the East China Sea, and then slowly worked our way back up north and east, all the way to the northern island of Hokkaido, before flying back home from Tokyo again. I say "we" because this time I was traveling with my good friend Chris, who I have known for almost 30 years. Chris had been studying Japanese, which occasionally came in handy, especially when we were interrogated by schoolchildren. For my previous trip, I had managed to find a good collection of bookstores and ink shops to visit around Tokyo, and a few in other cities, but for this trip, I had spent the past year collecting clues to the locations of exclusive inks all over the country, and I mapped them out to help with planning. I’ve got about a hundred of them here. If you want to use this map on your trips to Japan, I’ve posted a link to it below. But I’m getting ahead of myself. We landed that evening in Tokyo. We were only planning on staying there for a few days, and the weather was not all that different from Seattle. Pretty cold and rainy. As I mentioned, I had some work to do for a couple of days down in Yokohama, but I still went out to look around Tokyo in the evenings. And then, I woke up one morning to a clear and sunny sky, and I decided it was time to go look for some ink. Last year, Bungubox was in the middle of changing locations when I tried to visit, so I started by setting out for their new shop. I took the train from my hotel near Tokyo Tower up to Ochinomizu Station, and I found there were a bunch of cool guitar shops just outside. But after wasting a bit of time there, we walked through Meiji University and hooked around to the right and found the new Bungubox. The shop isn’t huge, but it’s nice and bright and well organized. They had some great notebook options, but I was immediately distracted by their unique ink bottles. There were plenty of colors to choose from, and I resisted my initial impulse to get one of the blues that I liked, and I ended up taking an ink called Piano Mahogany. When I was checking out, the store owner explained that with these boxes there’s an opening ceremony, since you can only do it once. Instead of opening the top flap, the boxes are designed so that you break open these perforated lines, and then flip up the whole top of the box. And here’s the bottle. They remind me a little bit of some of the Mont Blanc bottles, but in reverse. Instead of opening into the small section of the bottle, they open into the larger one. So the bottle shape is purely decorative rather than functional. They’re also on the expensive side, even in Japan. These cost 3200 yen for 30ml of ink, while the full-sized Pilot Iroshizuku ink bottles are typically half that price, about 1600 yen for twice as much ink. That said, with the current exchange rate, these Bungubox bottles are still only $20 each. So let’s see what this ink looks like. I’m going to swatch this ink on my Col-o-ring, on CD Premium Paper, on Iroful, and on Midori. Starting off here, on my Col-o-ring, this ink is actually more brown than I was expecting. The sample in the store was more purple, but there, once it goes down on the Iroful, that’s the color I was expecting. On most of these papers, it’s a slightly red-leaning medium brown, but on that Iroful, it’s a really purple brown, and I think it’s beautiful either way. There’s a touch of sheen on the Col-o- ring, but there’s quite a bit of green sheen on the Midori. The next day, as much as I wanted to visit Kingdom Note and all of the places that I had gone last year, I was even more excited to visit a few new places that I had found. The rain had returned, but I started out from Tokyo Station on foot and headed towards the Eslite Spectrum Store in Nihonbashi. Eslite is actually a really popular bookstore chain in Taipei, Taiwan. They have a huge bookstore that’s open 24 hours a day, although it’s big enough that it’s more like a department store at this point. Anyway, as you’d expect, the Eslite in Tokyo is a little oasis of Taiwanese goods in Japan, and it was really difficult to refrain from breaking my rule and buying all of these awesome Taiwanese inks when I found the stationery section. They had Ink Institute inks, Lennon Toolbar, and a few different lines of Kala inks. iPaper Tools to Live By, IWI, SKB, and of course, TWSBI. They also had some standard lines of Japanese inks, but eventually I found the shelves that held their exclusive inks. Here in the middle of the shelf are the two Sailor store exclusive inks in square bottles. One is called Sumisui Eslete Green, and the other is Edo Indigo. I told myself that I wasn’t going to start off the trip by buying another dark blue ink, so I got the green. To their left were two small bottles of ink made by Ink Mazeru, which is a small ink company from Osaka. These two inks are inspired by a popular milk tea from Taiwan. One of them is the original tea, and the other is rose milk tea. More of a pink color. So I skipped that one, but I got the original. You can actually buy this brand of milk tea on Amazon here in the US if you want to try it. And below that shelf there were several Kobe inks. The one on the far left is called Taiwan Alishan Green, and it’s an Eslete exclusive. The other four, it wasn’t clear that they were exclusive to Eslete, though they were definitely limited, but none of the colors grabbed me so I left them. In the back, there was this really cool looking exclusive bottle of ink in a decorative tin, and I almost bought it, but I didn’t. First of all, the price was pretty extravagant. Looking at it now, I think that maybe there was supposed to be a pen in that loop or something, but also it was a Lennon Toolbar ink from Taiwan, so it broke my rule. And it was pretty glittery, and that decided it for me. Very cool set, though. So let me show you the three inks that I did get there. I’m going to start with the Kobe Taiwan Alishan green and I’ll swatch it on the same papers. Oh, this ink is more watery than I was expecting. We might get some good shading out of it, though. It’s a thin olive color, a little cooler toned on the middle two papers, and on the Midori we get more color separation with that bright yellow green as it dries. And it does produce some nice shading when I write with it. Up next is the Sumisui Eslite green from Sailor. This is a really dark ink, so I’m being careful to leave some thin areas on these swatches. This is a pretty awesome ink. Look at how much color variation there is between the papers. This is an olive green again, but this time it’s not watery at all. Where the ink is heavy, we get something like a bronze colored sheen. On the CD Premium paper, the color is a little cooler than on the color ring, but on the Iroful, it’s dramatically bluer. It’s almost like a pine green instead of an olive. And on the Midori, this watch is nearly all brown. Very cool. And now, here’s a look at the Milk Tea ink. Again, this ink is pretty thin, and the color is a warm light brown. It’s pretty similar across all four papers, but it’s a little more pale and cool on the Iroful. And it’s warmer with really nice shading on the Midori. After leaving Eslete, I walked up the street another block into the really fancy Mitsukoshi building, and then went up to the fifth floor to Stationery Station. Their collection of pens was pretty nice. I wasn’t shopping for pens, but these Urushi Platinum pens were stunning. And I would have bought this blue 3776 if it had been the end of the trip and I still had $700 to spare. Eventually, I found their exclusive ink section, and I was happy to discover that they still had Sailor inks in vase bottles. They also had exclusive Tono and Lims and Tag stationery inks, but I think they were sold out of the tag color that I wanted. I’m pretty sure that I know which Sailor color I requested from the woman behind the counter, but I’m less certain that she knew what color I was requesting, and I haven’t opened the box yet since I got home, so let’s see what it turns out to be. Incidentally, this is what all of the good department stores do in Japan. If you buy just a little something, they wrap it nicely in plastic or paper or both, and then they usually seal it in a little shopping bag with store branded tape. It’s very charming, I think. Okay, yes, this has to be the color I was expecting. It’s not orange or blue. Right out of the bottle, this ink looks pretty purple. But even as I’m swatching it on this second card, the first one has dried enough that it’s starting to turn more of a reddish brown. And look at this amazing range of colors that we end up with. Sort of a mauve on the Col-o-ring, but more purple on the CD notebook, and quite a bit more violet on the Iroful. And back to that rusty brown and mauve on the Midori. The bronze tone on these swatches shows up where the ink is heavy, like a sheen, but it’s usually not really shiny like a sheen. Really fascinating, this one. I don’t know what the real name of this ink is, but the rough translation that I could get from Google was "devotion" slash "heart trouble", which I liked so I stuck with it. After Stationery Station, I walked across the famous old Nihombashi Bridge to the Touch & Flow, which is in the big Takashimaya department store up on the fifth floor. Touch and Flow has a nice collection of inks in these bottles that are shaped like slices of pie. They’ll probably be familiar to most of you from the Diamine 150th anniversary ink bottles. The inks are branded "Landscape" and the colors were actually pretty nice. There was a "wine", an "olive", a "blue", and a "blue-black". But it turned out that the inks were all made in Austria. So they broke my rule and I didn’t get any. I did get a few more bottles of ink that day, but I’m going to cut this video short and pick up here again in the next video in a few days. If you’re interested in this sort of thing and want to see the rest of the videos in this series, this is a good time to subscribe to my channel. And don’t forget about that like button down there if you think you might have a use for it. I’m in the process of making inks too, so I’ll post updates here when I have anything important to tell you. And that’s it! Stay safe out there everyone, and enjoy your fountain pens and ink. I’ll be back soon with another video.