The Best Luxury Japanese Fountain Pens

It comes with a Pilot CON-70 Converter, which uses a unique push-button mechanism to vacuum ink into its reservoir. It can hold a whopping 1.1 milliliters of ink, more than twice as much as other converters! Of course, you can also fill the fountain pen with cartridges.

Since its introduction in 1978, the 3776 has been repeatedly refined and improved. The Century—the latest design update—features Platinum’s innovative “Slip and Seal” cap design that keeps the nib from drying out for up to a year.

The 3776 Century is available in a range of nib sizes from extra fine to broad, including specialty nibs like ultra extra fine and soft fine.

Sailor’s 14 karat gold nibs have a slight amount of feedback, where you can feel the texture of the paper as you write. Writing with it feels like writing with a graphite pencil. If other gold nibs feel too smooth, you may prefer Sailor’s gold nibs.

New colors of the Pro Gear Slim are regularly released, including limited edition options. You can also check out the Sailor Pro Gear, which shares the same body design but is slightly larger (and has a 21 karat gold nib rather than a 14 karat gold one).

There are five different body styles to choose from, including the original Standard and slim Decimo. More expensive varieties are made with raden or resin, or have silent extension mechanisms.

However, this does mean that the Custom Heritage 92 can only be filled from an ink bottle, which may be inconvenient if you need to refill on the go.

The nib isn’t as flexible as a dip pen nib or vintage flex nib, so it won’t create dramatic line variation. Don’t press down too hard, or you may spring the nib, separating the tines permanently.

For the most line variation, use the soft extra fine or soft fine nibs. Because they naturally produce finer lines, the difference between upstrokes and downstrokes is more obvious.

Sailor occasionally releases limited edition versions of the Pro Gear Slim Mini, such as the Rencontre series. It uses marbled resin for the barrels, so each pen is unique.

The celluloid version of the 3776 Century has the same body shape, though there are some slight differences in the diameter, length, and weight.

The Kanazawa Leaf uses gold leaf from Kanazawa, Japan, a city with a long history of gold and silver lead production. The artworks on the barrels are inspired by iconic Japanese imagery, like cherry blossoms and Mt. Fuji.

Japanese nibs need to be more precise because Japanese writing can require many strokes per character. A finer nib makes sure that kanji are legible and aren’t confused with other characters.

If you’re not used to such a fine nib, you may feel that it has more feedback (where you can feel the texture of the paper as you write). Additionally, fine nibs are sharper and may scratch or dig into the paper. We recommend starting with a Japanese medium nib, which balances fineness and smoothness.