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*No affiliation* Recently my friends asked me to help them order some limited editions from Japan because most sellers don't ship abroad. I did a quick research and figured out some ways to get these limited editions shipped outside Japan. In my case, it is mostly Sailor fountain pens which they made with Nagasawa, Wancher, Bungu Box or Pen House. For example, my friend want to order to California a Japan LE Professional Gear which is 20000 JPY in retail price, you will have these options to choose: 1. Ask your acquaintance to help. Cost will be: 20000jpy + 1600jpy(Japanese tax) + 2000jpy (EMS cost to California) = 23600jpy ~ US$212 2. Using a forwarding service such as Tenso, Whiterabbitexpress or Zenmarket , fees as follow: Tenso: 20000jpy + 1600jpy(Japanese tax) + 2000jpy (EMS cost to California) + 300 (handling fee by tenso) = 23900 ~US$214Zenmarket cost will be: 20000jpy + 1600jpy(Japanese tax) + 2000jpy (EMS cost to California) + 300 (handling fee by Zenmarket) = 23900 ~US$214Whiterabbitexpress cost will be: 20000jpy + 1600jpy(Japanese tax) = 21600 ~US$194, but Whiterabbit will charge $18.37 (EMS cost to Carlifornia) + $4 (handling fee by whiterabbitexpress) so final will be US$ 216.373. Email directly to seller such as Nagasawa and Wancher and ask them directly about model that you want to order. If they are okay to ship, the cost will be same as case (1). Some sellers are not good at english and process is very complicated. Some sellers do not ship abroad either. 4. Order from ebay, there are some sellers offer limited edition on ebay but price is normally 10-20$ higher than when ordering by (1) (2) or (3) method. On ebay you can refer to seller pisuke, cooljapan, engeika or pensachi. These are popular japanese retailers that I could find. 5. Ordering from reseller that ship abroad. I have been always referring to Pisuke and Engeika as two of best retailers of fountain pen from Japan. Sad news: Pisuke is only on eBay and Engeika is off. So I searched around on Reddit, Instagram and Facebook and I found pensachi.com They are not popular yet but they to sell these limited editions and ship them abroad. There are lmited pens of Nagasawa, Bungu Box and Wancher on their site. For a 20000 models they sell it at $225 or $215 sometimes. There services are also in english so its a plus. Note: in case (1) (2) and (3) there might be extra fee of domestic shipping and handling depending on each seller. Sometimes it costs me extra 1080jpy for shipping fee and 432 for cod fee which are around uS$10-15 extra. I already recommended these methods to my friends, and now I don't order for them anymore. Some of them order by proxy shipping and some are using ebay and pensachi. I don't know if there are any other methods but my short research just came up with these. I hope it helps.

Sailor King of Pen PROFIT Sailor fountain pens owe their company name to an American sailor who first showed his fountain pen to the company’s founder. A lovely story whose reliability I have not confirmed. As Sailor is the name of the FP brand, I would have thought a maritime rank would be a more suitable name for the company’s flagship pen. For example, instead of the King, what about the Sailor Admiral? Regarding the regal title, King of Pen, the name makes me cringe. On Sailor’s website, this line of pens is titled ‘The King of Pens’. Yet the pen is engraved with ‘The King of Pen’. Grammatically, this results in a visceral reaction from even the most liberal grammar national socialist German worker’s party member. The ‘Sailor King of Pens’ sounds more refined, and is what Sailor ought to have engraved on the cap band on their flagship. They could easily have left off the ‘THE’ on the band for the inclusion of the ‘s’ and the end of ‘pen’. The ‘King of Pen’ grates my nerves to a Parmesan cheese dust as effectively as sentences such as: ‘They are all lovely gentleman.’ ‘Our chicken is fresh and responsibility sourced.’ That said, or at least, written, the Sailor KOP is a satisfying acronym, as is SKOP. Within a week. The SKOP has assumed leadership of the populace of my other writing instruments. I think it is worthy of the praise sung by the peasantry who have applauded it prior to this review. First impressions of the SKOP Profit: It’s a very nicely weighted pen. I don’t know how many units, measured in metric or imperial quantities correspond to ‘nice’, yet the pen is pleasantly balanced. It’s almost exactly a larger version of the 1911 Sailor fountain pen; the key differences being the heavier section, flexible nib, and a superfluous ‘ink window’. Olfactory Impressions: The box stank of Urushi, like the Urushi King of Pen(s) that I tried in a local pen store a few weeks before I bought my SKOP Profit. The Urushi scent is not unlike tired tyres. Fortunately the PROFIT is scentless. Given that the box reeks of Urushi, I assume Sailor’s factories must also stink of it, and that someone ought to tell Urushi to wear deodorant. The SKOP Nib: The nib is broad shouldered, two-toned, (the two tones being b-flat and g-sharp) gold and rhodium-plated piece of art. It compliments the size of the SKOP. It is the shiniest nib I own, the debossed lettering on the nib contributing to the glossy, glassy reflection of the gold and rhodium. The gloss may be attributed to the few litres of transparent grease that the pen feed and section were filled with when it left the factory; there was as much grease in the pen as there is in the business ‘invaginations’ of life-size Japanese coitus robots that, as collectibles, make us pen-o-philes seem positively mundane and sensible. Transported to our hero via aeroplane, I think that the pressure changes the pen was exposed to may have sucked a lot of the grease out of the nib and section and into the inner cap. When I unscrewed the pen for the first time, or unthreaded it, for it lacks any screws, the grease formed a seal that held the cap to the pen even though the cap was spinning in my hands as I continued to ‘unthread’ it. There are still a few viscous droplets in the inner cap, which makes me think the nib may be coated in the stuff. The broad nib writes like a Western F-M. It’s very smooth, with much less feedback on the paper then the B 1911 midsize, and the Z 1911 full size nibs. The nib is NOT as smooth as writing with butter on a hot pane of liquid mercury held in suspension by an electromagnetic field. Of the reviewers who describe pens as writing ‘like butter on hot glass’ I challenge them to a) actually write with butter on hot glass, c) under go a drug test, and c) the third letter of the alphabet. The SKOP nib is as smooth as a plastic computer stylus when I write on Rhodia paper, and smoother still on the sheeny sheets of Clairefontaine. It has enough flex to have character, though I’m limited to the 26 characters of the English alphabet, and the line it produces when unflexed is thin enough that it could be used for everyday writing. That is, if you are wealthy enough to be able to risk taking such a pen to work daily. The nib is moderately wet. All my Sailors, and all my Sailor pens, write smoothly with a wet line- whilst this is the wettest of all three. The feed is almost as large as the nib, ½ the size of the distal phalanx of my smallest finger, halved in the coronal plane when standing in the anatomical position. Section: Like all the other sailor Profit pens (if you don’t have one, this description is tremendously helpful), only larger. Or so it seems! The section, internally (internally to the barrel) is very long. And ornate. It resembles a rotor mechanism on a miniature steampunk rendition of a submarine. It’s also very heavy due to the addition of metal to the otherwise plastic component. Having decorations inside the pen is not quite as bad for your health as drinking cocktails laced with precious stones, but equally superfluous. At the height of superfluousness is the ‘ink window’ inside the section; a tic-tac shaped hiatus that enables one to view the ink supply remaining in the pen. Provided that you remove the section from the barrel, and have not depressed the plunger less than 50%. In which case (and in which section), you would know that the pen is otherwise practically full of ink, and the remaining ink volume doesn’t require checking. Filling System: Plunge nib and section into a bottle of ink and screw the converter plunger upwards. That’s the system of filling required to fill this pen, unless you are a blasphemous fiend who is so unimaginative as to only use Sailor ink in Sailor ink cartridges. I feel that Sailor have missed the boat with this filling system. Indeed, I think they have missed all boats by not naming their pen lines after various ships and maritime technology, but I dig the ress. Incidentally, at this point in the first draft of my review that I was writing with my SKOP, the ink ran out. After writing only four A4 pages. Thus emphasising the point that I was about to make; that Sailor have missed the opportunity to make this a truly incredible pen by endowing it with a jumbo converter. A large wet nib, with a feed that could easily feed a small nation, it REQUIRES a large converter. The extra space in the barrel is not utilised, nor is the opportunity to make the pen weightier. This makes the larger ink capacities of the Pelikan M1000 and Mont Blanc 149 much more attractive in the same price bracket. And the Lamy 2000 unmissable in a lower price bracket. Threads: Are what you are currently reading as you try to decide which pen to purchase with that little bit of extra income you pretend you can afford to spend on pens. The threads on this pen are what I have come to expect from Sailor. Fine, smooth to touch (when writing with this pen, the threads feel like another gold band around the section, rather than the terrain where JEEP would film an advertisement for their shoddy vehicles). When threading the cap onto the pen, there is a reassuring ‘grabbiness’ at the end of the thread ‘coil’. Unlike the M1000 that abruptly stops after 1.5 full rotations of the cap, and which 1/10 of a rotation in the reverse direction will sufficiently loosen the cap. Cap: A very large cap that posts as efficiently as the Australia Post company does; it can post, but why bother? It’s fraught with disaster. I have more faith that a letter will reach my correspondent if I set it alight and flush it down the toilet than if I affix a stamp to it and place it in an Auspost box. The SKOP cap perches on the end of the pen, the inner cap just fitting the tip of the pen, and the slightest pressure from the abducens policis (the flesh pad or muscle that secures your thumb to your first metacarpal and allows you to adduct your thumb as you do when holding a pen) will knock it off. The pen is absurdly large with the cap (barely) posted, although it doesn’t seem to affect the weight of the pen when I’m writing with it. Fortunately it’s such a large pen that it’s not necessary to post it. Clip: For the pen with the highest royal ranking, or title of King, the clip is as ordinary and common as Henry the VIII’s carnal desires. The Sailor’s traditional three tiered clip is featured on this pen. Whilst it looks the same as the clips on the other pens, it’s much springier. Not spring loaded, but with more flex at the angle where the clip bends and runs parallel to the shaft of the cap. It’s so springy that I had to double check, for the sake of this review, and triple check, to ensure my ocular organs were functioning, to confirm that the clip wasn’t spring loaded. It’s a suitably broad clip that I would trust it in a suit’s breast pocket, but unlike the Lamy Safari’s clip, I wouldn’t trust it to hold the pen in the back pocket of my jeans whilst skateboarding. My criticism of the clip is that, for the price, and for their flagship, I think that Sailor could have designed a more attractive, more regal clip. Even if it were more angular at the tip, so as to denote the angles of a royal crown (I don’t suggest they make the clip as kitschy as stamping a golden crown to the clip). I simply, or complexly, think it could be made more impressive. Barrel: A large, broad shape like the eponymous cousin of the cigarette and distant relative of the ever more popular VAPE device. The cigar shape is more bulbous than the Midsize and Large 1911 pens I own, which in turn makes the ends of the pen blunter rather than pointed. The blunter tips of the pen make the pen seem larger than it is, and strengthens the association between size, design, and higher quality of the more expensive flagship. The plastic is the same high quality plastic of all Sailor pens (all the plastic ones, that is) in the 1911 series. It’s light, but doesn’t feel too thin, and doesn’t feel tacky like the ABS plastic from which Lamy Safari’s are made (Lamy lovers can put down their base ball bats and pistols; I still love Lamy Safari’s and have a lot of them, I use the adjective tacky to describe the feel, and not the quality of the Safari, which remains one of the toughest FP’s I own). The only negative I have noticed with the Sailor plastic is that the threads tend to collect skin and oils from my hands, and this accumulates as a clay coloured jam in the sulci. Perhaps it’s simply that the plastic is so shiny it’s more noticeable. Not at all significant or a problem, but collectors who obsess over keeping their pens as clean and polished as onyx mirrors may find they are required to give their Sailors more happy-endings than their other FPs. This is a beautiful, subtle flagship of a pen. I chose the profit SKOP because it was the cheapest of the SKOP f-ships available online. If I was to invest a significant sum of money into an Urushi pen, I would rather buy a Nakayama or Namiki Urushi pen, for I think that these are more attractive and unique than the Sailor KOP Urushi’s. For the price, I think the pen is excellent. It’s very comfortable to write with, the nib performance is as profound, and not as short-lived as Heath Ledger’s JOKER in Batman the Dark Knight. The only improvement Sailor could make would be to their clip designs (at least, on their URUSHI line), and to create a larger converter for this pen (surely that isn’t too hard to do? If there is a Sailor representative out there reading this, please consider this for the sake of the overly invested fountain pen collector who actually uses flagship pens to write with!) The KOP is a worthy addition I can see myself using lots, and see myself in the barrel’s reflection, and keeps my Pelikan M1000 from monopolising my collection, forcing it to play other board games with pens of lesser value in my collection. If you can afford one, they are brilliant pens. If you can’t, the 1911 Large, and 1911 Mid-size are excellent pens also. For my reviews of the pens compared in this review, the Pelikan M400, Pilot Custom 823, and Lamy 2000, and Laban Mento, please see the links below: Lamy 2000 https://www.fountainpennetwork.com/forum/topic/191060-lamy-2000-story-review/?hl=%2Blamy+%2B2000+%2Breview Pelikan m400 https://www.fountainpennetwork.com/forum/topic/190262-pelikan-m400-review/?hl=pelikan Custom 823 https://www.fountainpennetwork.com/forum/topic/189405-pilot-custom-823-rantview/ Laban Mento https://www.fountainpennetwork.com/forum/topic/189668-laban-mento-electric-yellow/

Hello FPN!! I always liked fountain pens; for years I have only written with one. But it was only about a year or two ago I REALLY got the fountain pen fever. As in buying pens that cost as much as a regular day of work, and having no place to put them, and walking around everyday carrying 4 or five of them. lately, my EDC has about 15 pens... But, I digress. So, I wanted to talk about this amazing pen I just got in the mail a couple a days ago. I always read a lot of good things about Sailor, and was really interested in trying one of their specialty nibs, but they were so expensive!! So, one day, browsing ebay I found this seller, Bombare, announcing a auction with the sexiest of the specialty nibs, and made a bid of less than half the retail value for this pen. Needless to say I spent days hardly sleeping, obsessively checking ebay to see if some @@%##$#$# had outbid me...!! then WOW!!! I won it!!! I could hardly believe it!!! Finnally I would own one of those magic nibs!! About one month later ( yep, customs in Brazil can take an incredible amount of time to release items... making my life a lot harder!!) I received a nicely package from Japan, with this outstanding pen!! Now, to the review! First impressions: The box is a lot bigger than regular sailor boxes, and more luxurious. Inside the cardboard box there was another box in a kind of velvet lining, nice. Opening it there was a nice Sailor logo, a converter, two cartdriges a booklet and a nice letter in japanese, probably saying "Thank you for buying our pen, we hope you like blablabla" And the pen. Montblanc?? Nope, but pretty close. it seems Sailor has a bit of a thing for MB... Appearance and design: 9-10 The pen is very beautiful, solid, quality plastic. My wife dropped it uncapped about one hour after I got it ( almost led me to a divorce...) and I could see no damage. Impressive. Three gold bands. nice clip, the big band says "Sailor Japan founded 1911". Very atractive, but nothing exactly new. High quality though, You can feel it. Filling system: 7-10 Sailor proprietary converter. Nice, works well, eazy to clean. But it takes a minuscule amount of ink. Nib : 10-10 This is where Sailor truly shines. My friends, this is the SEXIEST nib I have ever seen. Look at these lines, this pronouced beak, the crisp inprints... I fell in love with it at first sight. It´s actually two nibs fused together, one on top of each other, and the tip has a interesting design, reminds me of a eagle beak. And the tip also has a cross shaped slit, to increase inkflow. But the nib is only as good as how it writes, rigth?? And how does this baby rolls?? In one word: delicious. The downside writes a japanese fine, quite smooth, some feedback, but very pleasant. No flex, as per the design of the nib. When writing upside-down is where this baby shines: it writes a luxurious, thick, brush-like line. Butter smooth, glides across the paper. It´s very pleasant. So much so that I like to just doodle with it. It´s kind of an accountant nib, where the downstrokes are thinner than side strokes. Lovely shading too. Never has this baby skipped on me either. Cost and value.8-10 Aye, that´s the rub. It usually retails for 535 ( nibs.com ) wich is quite expensive for a pen, no matter how you look at it. It does deliver an outstanding experience, but it´s a bit steep. I could never bring myself to pay full price. BUT, as I said in the beginning, I payed half price for it, and I think it´s truly a bargain. Even for full price I would buy it if it wasn´t for the insane amout of taxes and headache I would have here. Conclusion: 34-40 I really love this pen, can you tell?? Lovely body, very sturdy ( as my wife proved it...) and the sexiest, juiciest nib in the house. If you like interesting pens, smooth, and with many aplications, grab it. It costs about as much as a Montblanc but I think its so much better. So, that´s about it. Hope you enjoy it, I welcome any advice. See ya!!

Hello everyone, I am a new FPN member so please excuse me for any FPN faux pas I may commit . I stumbled across the site yamadapen.com today while looking for a Visconti Wall Street. I have been looking for a decently priced Wall Street for ages now and I came across this site but their prices seem much too good to be true ( ex. on the Wall Street it's around $160 USD). I was wondering if anyone had used or even heard of the site before or if you believe these pens are Chinese fakes. The site is in Japanese however if you put the link into Google Translate and select Japanese to English that will do the trick. Any information would help! Thanks everyone. PS I'm not sure if this is the right area to post this so please excuse me again. Sorry just realized this is definitely not the right area to post this

Hello everybody!! Hope you don´t mind, but today I want to brag a bit about my new fountain pen. First, a little story: I live in Brazil, wich is kind of a wilderness in terms of fountain pens. They are very hard to find, and expensive. So I do most of my buying online, and abroad when I have the chance. Last month I went to NY, and took the chance to go to Fountain Pen Hospital ( awesome place, by the way, almost had a nerdgasm! ) And was attended by a really nice guy, I think his name was Jimmy Hutchinson. He almost made me broke. SO,after browsing around the store and drooling quite a lot, I was ready to get to business. I was thinking of buying a Pelikan M1000, but they had only one, in green ( don´t really like it ) and in medium, and it was on display, so didn´t really drive me nuts. So I thought :" Why not a Nakaya?? " And Jimmy showed it to me. It had a really lovely color, but as I picked it up it felt too light, too insubstancial. The nib was the same as in the platinum president, which also struck me as a bit cheap ( Why not make a nib especially for it?? It´s their most expensive pen, isn´t it?) and I didn´t like the threads, in metal and right in the middle of the grip section. I wasn´t very impressed, and didn´t even get to do a writing sample ( please, Nakaya fans, don´t throw tomatoes on me! ). So Jimmy, damn him, said something like: " Well, these are nice, but I have something here that´s light years ahead. Take a look." And showed me the Namiki Urushi Royal in red. I had already seen it in the glass, and thought it looked kinda nice, but waaaaaay overpriced. But as I picked it in my hands I heard me saying "Wooooow..." It was a bit of a shock, really!! IT had Weight, Substance, SOUL!! Impressive, the texture, the weight, the feeling... I don´t know if you believe in that, but japanese people believe that, when an artist makes something truly amazing, he leaves a bit of his soul in it. And I kid you not, I could feel it vibrate with the soul of the maker. Truly a transcendental experience. And I could tell this nib was made exclusevely for this pen, they match so well together!! And the threads are on the section, hardly noticeable. Then, he made me do a writing sample. Damn him. It was simply the lovelyest, brightest, smoothest ride ever!! Butter smooth, a bit of line variation, really soft nib, and the gougeousest (is that a word?) shading I have ever seen!!!! I got hooked!!! Needless to say, I got it. I left the store considerably poorer, but with a silly grin on my face. So, on to the review! Boxing: Really atractive, high end. Comes in a wooden box contained inside a cardboard box. Inside the wood box, on a red velvet lining, rests The Pen and a bottle of namiki ink. Really classy. Construction and quality: 5/5 Amazing, solid, really shiny, impressive. Doesn´t seem to be made by human hands, the urushi looks so regular. But you can immediately feel something, can´t quite explain. If you ever have the chance, take one in your hand, you´ll know what I´m talking about. Also, the clip is inserted as if by magic, it is not cut and threaded like every other fountain pen, it seems to have simply sprout from there!! Filling mechanism: 5/5 Only thing I felt not to be perfect, but actually it´s the con-50, holds a nice amount of ink, and any other filling mechanism would require tampering with the elegant lines of the pen, so I think it really is the best choice here Nib:5/5 Beautiful, perfect proportions with the pen, and has the same air of understated elegance as the pen. It says " Namiki, 18k-750 <M>. It doesn´t need to brag about it´s beauty, but you can feel it. Performance:5/5 Delicious, buttersmooth, cushioned ride. SImply the BEST pen I ever wrote with. Plus that glorious shading!! Just my favourite amount of wetness, and has a little bit of line variation, but it´s not flexible, just soft. Conclusion: 20/20 This has become my favourite pen, the one I would salvage from a fire, a sinking ship or a divorce. Not only it´s unsurpassed in understated beauty, quality, durability, it´s also the best mean of putting ink into paper. It´s quite expensive, but worth every penny. Remember, it´s not a pen you are buying, but a work of art. Well, that´s about it. Hope you enjoy it!! Cheers!!

So....I just won this really strange pen on eBay and was wondering if anyone has any information on it. At first glance, it looks like one of those paper umbrellas you stick into cocktail drinks.... Turn it around and---ooo! Surprise, it's a geisha! Unscrew it and---whoa, is that a nib? Pretty weird! But I liked the looks of it, so I got it anyways... The only info I can find is this other eBay listing for a similar "umbrella fountain pen", but for waaaay more: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Japanese-Minim-Fountain-Pen-in-Pink-Color-Umbrella-Shaped-Original-Stamp-1950/380450183140?_trksid=p2047675.m1850&_trkparms=aid%3D222007%26algo%3DSIC.MBE%26ao%3D1%26asc%3D17905%26meid%3D1503916414376392040%26pid%3D100011%26prg%3D8262%26rk%3D1%26rkt%3D5%26sd%3D141066324596%26 And....a random blog entry with the clone of my pen here: http://www.rubylane.com/item/172908-JOY1440/Vintage-Celluloid-Fountain-Pen-Figural As far as I can guess, it's a vintage Japanese celluloid pen of some type. The nib reads "IDEAL Pen", and some further info can be found in the original listing here: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Vtg-Antique-NOS-Painted-Celluloid-Novelty-Umbrella-Fountain-Pen-Ideal-Pen-Nib-/141066324596?_trksid=p2047675.l2557&ssPageName=STRK%3AMEWNX%3AIT&nma=true&si=blKEkbymAjt6dnfBEH2abTwzINo%253D&orig_cvip=true&rt=nc I'd appreciate some more information!