Fountain Pen, one of the most classic writing tools. But nowadays, they might look like a luxurious tool. A tool that is used by hipsters and the well-offs. If you think that, you are now alone. I used to think like that to, until one day. Let me tell you a story.
A day in 2016, when I was about to return from my internship in Japan, my family and I were in a stationery store in Osaka area. My brother was buying a Platinum Preppy fountain pen. Because he said that it was very good and was very cheap (JPY200), I decided to bought one too.
Now, before that I was using some local, cheap ball point pens that I bought in bulk. Because these type of pen tends to cycle in market quickly, after I find the one I like I need to buy in bulk. (Actually, I still have around 30 pens left). I was mostly using blue pens at that time, but after being in Japan and found that most of the people seem to be using black pen, I ended up getting a black EF (0.2) Platinum Preppy fountain pen, along with a 10-pack of black ink cartridges.
One of the thing I hate about traditional exam is that writing a full 20 pages of text made my hands very tired. But after using fountain pen for the exam, I was surprised to find that my hands were much less tired that I was expecting. Actually, my hands weren’t tired at all. And yes, exams were the only time when I was using pen extensively, because back then I take notes fully using mechanical pencils (again, some cheap one with huge amount of eraser). But you can’t really do exams using pencil, can you?
Needless to say, after experiencing the benefits of fountain pen first hand, I was sold. Some time after that, I bought Lamy Safari EF in Charcoal black, along with Lamy Black 50ml ink. Now, in my country the Lamy brand is among the most poplar brand, so that’s why I ended up getting one. It was also then that I start to look up more information, including pen reviews, online. I also found out that Platinum Preppy is a darn good pen.
Even though in my country Lamy pens also come with the converter, I ended up refilling the pen using syringe to refill the cartridges, because I hadn’t refill any fountain pen in a long time, and I was afraid of the mess. Nevertheless, it worked well.
I was also interest in more bottled ink and better notebooks. But back then, I don’t know any good shops that is available, so instead I waited. I didn’t really look up anything in detail, other than that Lamy has many colours and Midori MD looks to be an extremely good notebooks.
After I moved to Japan, I began my search. And unexpectedly, I fell into the hole of Japanese Stationery. Even though I don’t draw nor sketch, only writing, the Japanese Stationery world is truly scary.
I will write in detail about fountain pends, inks, and notebooks later.
As a person with basic comprehension of Japanese, it is also frustrating because a lot of things you read online (in English) isn’t applicable here in Japan at all, especially price. Japanese-made items are usually much cheaper here, while western-made is much more expensive. Fortunately Japanese-made items are usually good.