Japan 2024: Part 3, Hunting for Fountain Pen Inks in Nagasaki and Fukuoka

https://www.instagram.com/glass_studio_aun_staff/

In this video, I finally moved on from the Tokyo area all the way to the Southwest island of Kyushu and the cities of Nagasaki and Fukuoka. After visiting the local sights, I visited the Ishimaru Stationery Flagship store and bought 3 bottles of ink and an AUN Glass Studio pen.

Stationery Department Store – Ishimaru Bunkoudou

Somehow I didn’t manage to visit any of the stationery shops in Fukuoka, but I did visit the Tamaoki / CuLuRe store in Iizuka, not far away. There I found a dozen Sailor inks in vase bottles, and chose three to try out.
https://www.tamaoki.co.jp/

Hello again, I’m Matthew Gore from thewetpen.com and welcome back to my search for rare and exclusive inks in Japan After spending just four nights in Tokyo, I woke up on a sunny Monday morning and headed to Tokyo Station, where we boarded a bullet train heading southwest along the coast towards the southern island of Kyushu and the city of Nagasaki. The train slipped past Yokohama and then Mount Fuji, then hours of tea fields and hills and coastal cities. And finally we took the tunnel under the Oseto straight to the island of Kyushu. And when we transferred to our final train, I knew I was going to like the place. Right inside the doors of the train, I was greeted by this little display behind glass, with a Tono & Lims ink that was exclusive to a local shop. And I was right. Nagasaki quickly became one of my favorite cities in Japan. It was getting dark when we got there, so we only took a quick look around, but the city was decorated along the central river for the Lantern Festival, and it was really beautiful, even in the fading light. With my jet lag, I was up before sunrise, so I went out with my camera to watch the city wake up, and to scope out the location of a pen shop that I wanted to visit. Nagasaki has a wonderful mixture of colonial architecture with Chinese and traditional Japanese, and it’s a large enough city to have just about anything that you might want, but it’s still small enough to feel personal. When the sun was all the way up, I went back and met up with Chris, and we decided that before going to the first pen shop, we’d visit the atomic bomb detonation site. It’s hard to describe that experience, and I guess I won’t try, except to say that it was much more moving than I expected. Part of the reason was that the Japanese people that we met at the site were so friendly with us, along with the fact that both of my grandparents on my father’s side were members of the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos that developed that atomic bomb. My grandfather was a chemist, and my grandma Gore was a mathematician on the project. We visited the fountains and the monuments with their strings of paper cranes, and we stopped in at the museum, but Chris and I both agreed that what we had already seen was enough, and we left pretty early to see the rest of the city. Like a lot of cities in Japan, Nagasaki has a large covered shopping arcade that sprawls around several city blocks, and this one was home to the four-story Ishimaru Stationery flagship store. I quickly found my way to the second-floor fountain pen, and ink section, and I started off looking at the warehouse of Tono & Lims inks. There were literally hundreds and hundreds of them. Not just on these shelves, but also around the corner on the next side. and around the corner again. But across from them was the section of exclusive inks, and the bulk of that was taken up with the Ishimaru line of "Color Bar" inks. These are pretty popular. I’ve seen them advertised in a lot of Japanese stationery magazines, and there are tons of colors of these too. At least 87 of them. But there were so many that I couldn’t decide on a color, and I ended up just skipping them altogether. But there were more exclusive inks too. These are the Nagasaki Bikei inks, with each one of them named after a local attraction. I bought the Glover Gardens bottle, which I had briefly visited, and I got the Gukanjima Sunset Grey, which just didn’t sound like anything else in my collection. I believe that these are all made by Sailor. They used to be available in vase bottles. And yes, it says "Sailor" on the bottom of these bottles, but this is unusual packaging for a Sailor made ink. Next to those were some pink exclusive tonewin limbs bottles of ink for dip pens called something like fresh ginger. But then there were these four "Nagasaki Delicious" inks named after some local food specialties. I really liked the idea of a flying fish ink, but this one with the bowl of noodles is called Champon or Champ-on or something, which is a local style of noodles that I had had for lunch. It’s vaguely similar to ramen but often topped with oysters or other seafood, and the noodles are these large udon-style noodles. So I got that bottle even though it was a tonewin limbs and made in Korea. Let’s take a look at these three before I move on. First, I’m going to swatch this Glover Garden on four papers, my Col O Ring as usual. Then this second one is Yu Sari paper, a new addition to my videos. Then Tomoe River and Midori MD, which is Ivory. Oh, okay, this isn’t exactly what I expected. It’s a much thinner, paler, gray-green. But I do sort of like it. It reminds me of Deep Sea Green from Faber-Castell. Looks like there could be some good shading, or it could just be hard to read. Anyway, it’s pretty similar on all four papers. There’s a little more color separation on the Tomoe River. And of course, the color looks a little bit warmer on the Midori. Up next is this Sunset Gray. I’m not even really sure what to expect with this one, so this should be interesting. This is also a little bit on the thin side and it’s more orange or brown than pink so far, but we’ll see how it dries. And when it’s dry, it’s mostly a dull brown color, but we do get a blush of pink in the shading, except for on the Tomoe River paper, where it’s a completely different color that’s much more pink with a purple-blue shading. That’s pretty cool, and I bet we’d get this same color from Iroful and Cosmo papers too. Now, this little bottle of Nagasaki Delicious ink. Wow, this one is a lot more interesting than I expected. It is basically a beige noodle color, but it has this interesting reddish brown shading, and the base color itself looks a little more opaque than I expected. There is some feathering on the Col O Ring and the Yu Sari. The ink looks quite a bit more pale on the Tomoe River, and it looks very nice and smooth with beautiful shading on the Midori. And I probably would have gone back and looked at the Color Bar inks a bit more if I hadn’t been distracted by the glass pen selection. They had these pens with either a cat’s head or a cat’s foot on the end, and I thought these ones were actually really beautiful. But what had grabbed my attention were the pens made by the AUN Studio. The grips on these looked like a good size for my hand, and look at this beautiful glass. But if you look at the back of this row of pens, you can almost see that the nibs on some of them are a special glass, and that’s what I decided to get. This is the pen box. AUN is a glass studio near Okayama, and they’re among the most prominent in Japan. In fact, I have this Japanese book of glass pens, and AUN pens are featured here starting on page 36. And I also lifted this photo from their Instagram account. I’ve linked it below. But man, this glass is amazing. I wish that I’d found one of these. But this is the one that I did find. The first of three glass pens that I got on the trip. What I liked in particular about these is that the nibs are an opal white instead of that standard clear glass. The material is beautiful in its own right with its semi opacity and subtle shifts in color. But it also has the practical function of allowing you to better see how much ink is on the nib and what color it is. And this is the glass of the body of the pen. It’s a lot like a galaxy blue acrylic. It’s a deep blue with a nebula of lighter blue, and it’s all infused with glittery stars. It’s easily the most comfortable glass pen that I own, and it has a medium-fine tip which works nicely. Of course, now that I’ve looked longer at some of my photos at the other glass pens, I wish that I had bought another one or two of the others, but I’m glad that I at least got this one. There was another branch of this Ishimaru stationery down at the waterfront, but I didn’t make it there, and instead we spent the rest of the afternoon looking around the city, and the next morning we took the short train ride back up to Fukuoka. Fukuoka is pretty great because it’s the birthplace of Tonkotsu ramen, and I’m a big fan. But also, just outside my hotel, there seemed to be an endless string of temples and shrines and parks. And they were all beautiful, with the pink cherry blossoms starting to appear. There weren’t any convenient pen shops, so we just wandered around and saw the sights. Overnight, though, it really started raining. And when I took a look around in the morning, I decided that it would be a good day to get out of the rain a bit and take the train up to the Tamaoki Stationary Store in the nearby town of Iizuka. The train ride through the misty green hills was lovely and peaceful, and when we arrived, the town of Iizuka seemed sleepy and quaint in the rain that continued to fall. After a 15 minute walk, my map showed that we were close to the place, but the signs didn’t really match. They said things like "CuLuRe Cafe in Zakka" or "CuLuRe Zakka and Stationery". But when I found the front door, there was a sign to let me know that I was in the right place. Although I never did find out what a Zakka was. Anyway, the store was large and spread over three buildings. And despite the backwater feel of the town on that day, the shop was modern and fashionable in the Tokyo style. They had all sorts of home and office goods, plenty of general school and office supplies, and of course, a fountain pen section. They had the same glass pens with cats on them, and some other nice ones too. I found some common western inks and of course Tono and Lims, including six Fukuoka inks. There were Platinum and Taccia, and these Starry Night inks from Hungary. And I found these three Mishima inks again. But of course, what I was looking for were these 12 Sailor inks in vase bottles. And since I’d traveled a bit to get there and hadn’t seen many vase bottles on the trip so far, I decided to buy three of them. First I chose this one with the purplish label called Violet. The subtitle is "A Small Flower of Happiness," which I liked. Then I got this orangey red called Tahei. And finally, I picked this one simply because I liked the name. It’s called "Hometown of Fireflies." The description of the ink on this poster says, "In Iizuka City and Kama City, fireflies live along the beautiful waterfronts. The ink was created with the image of a home for fireflies, a summer tradition", and the ink was released in July of 2021. So let’s take a look at what these three look like. I’m going to swatch these on the same four papers, starting with the violet. Huh, this is much more of a red and magenta than I was expecting for something called violet, but it’s a great color. As it dries down, a lot of that color is obscured by a green sheen. The Col O Ring and the Yu Sari are both very similar, but on the Midori the ink is almost entirely green, while the swatch on the Tomoe River didn’t end up with much sheen at all and is mostly this dark magenta. Now let’s take a look at this reddish Tahei. Yes, this definitely starts off as a nice orangey red. I really like this color, and it’s nice and smooth going down on the paper. As it dries, we get a little bit of green sheen in the heaviest areas. On the Yu Sari, the ink leans a little bit more pink where it’s thin, but it’s pretty similar to the Col O Ring. The color is quite a bit more red on the Tomoe River, and on the Midori it’s a little bit more orange with the heaviest green sheen. And finally, that brings us to the "Hometown of Fireflies". Ah, that’s a really pretty dusk blue. It’s a pale enough ink that it looks like it’ll produce some good shading. I’ll have to see. This ink doesn’t look significantly different on any of the papers. Maybe just a little bit greener on the Ivory Midori paper, which is to be expected. Anyway, after buying these three inks, we walked back to the train station in the rain, stopping in at a dessert shop along the way. And then we took the train back to Fukuoka, where it continued to rain for the rest of the day. The next morning we left the island of Kyushu and spent a few days in Hiroshima, and I’ll pick up again there in the next video in this series. If you’d like to see that video and you’re not already subscribed, this is a good time to do it. And don’t forget about that like button down there if you’ve enjoyed this video. And that’s it! Stay safe out there everyone, and enjoy your fountain pens and ink. I’ll see you back here next week with a new video.