Sailor Manyo Chigaya - A Lazy Review

[A Smug Dill]

Sailor has doubled the number of ink colours in its Manyo line of inks recently, by adding another eight in the second half of 2020, after first introducing the product line in 2019. I don't have any of the first eight, but with COVID inspiring all that panic buying, and a significant discount on offer for pre-orders for the new colours, I ordered the four relatively more subdued and/or sombre ones; and, after much delay, they finally arrived.
 
Chigaya, which is probably the most sombre looking of the lot, was the first bottle I opened.
 

 

(When I was developing the chromatography strip for this ink, I though a Dementor from the world of Harry Potter was going to come at me. Ridiculous!)

 

The drawing on the bottle label seems to suggest a good range of shading out of a warm grey ink; but, writing on Rhodia Dotpad 80g/m² paper, it just looks mostly like a black ink.

 

 
The Sailor Fude de Mannen pen I used struggled to write when inked with Diamine Registrar's Ink, but has no problem with Sailor Manyo Chigaya. On the other hand, it doesn't write quite as wetly or broadly as when I used KWZ Ink Warsaw Dreaming in that pen. So, I'll say the 'wetness' of this ink is moderate, somewhere between those other two inks I mentioned.
 
There is some shading, but it is very subtle.
 

 
There is no sheen that I could see.
 
Water resistance is very good, if the measure is how legible writing would be after a looong soak. However, colour will definitely get lifted off the page on contact with water; and the bluish component of the run-off is apt to stain the area covered by that body of water.
 

 

All in all, I'd say this is a decent but boring ink; and I can't think of why I would prefer it to, say, Monteverde Black Ash or Standard Bindery Stargaze.

[yazeh]

I love "lazy" reviews. They cut to the chase. Thanks a lot... This seems to be another Doyou.....to avoid

[Dimy]

Nothing special color for me either plus sailors recent price hike has inspired me to stay away until prices are down to "Hmm.....maybe worth looking category" well even then this one will be avoided for while,,,Platinum carbon black is still having my crown for black.....true for my region at least.

 

The lazy review is very nice, thanks for that.

[LizEF]

Thanks for the review! One Manyo I won't be buying.

[Eclipse157]

Thanks for the review. I was expecting something more interesting from this one...

 

I have a few of the new Manyo inks on their way in sample form, including this one. I guess my expectations will pour over to Shirakashi, Kakitsubata, Ume and Sakura

[Intensity]

I've been very curious about this ink. The drawing on the label made me wonder if this was going to be a tinted gray ink with notes of blue-teal, but it seems to be a fairly boring dark near-black ink. The wash is nice though, seen on the water resistance test sheet. Could be nice with water brushes, but not too exciting.

[A Smug Dill]

  On 10/23/2020 at 3:33 AM, Intensity said:

The wash is nice though, seen on the water resistance test sheet. Could be nice with water brushes, but not too exciting.

 

 

The first line under "Water resistance" on the writing sample sheet was washed/smeared with a water brush pen.

[AmandaW]

Thankyou for crossing that one off my to-try list. I like greys in general, but not so much the slate greys and it can be difficult to discern that from web images. Actually they not bad for writing and I quite like pens in that hue, but as an ink for drawing figures or landscape, ugh, not for me. Except for Smurfs. Maybe,

 

Why is it called a lazy review? Looks pretty thorough. Did I miss something? Again.

[A Smug Dill]

  On 10/23/2020 at 7:06 AM, AmandaW said:

Why is it called a lazy review? Looks pretty thorough. Did I miss something?

 

By lazy, I meant — for the purposes of reviewing an ink — I'm only going to fill one converter with the ink once, use it in only one pen, and write on one type of paper for the review. (Actually, preferably only a single sheet of paper; but as I have some discarded sheets from failed "single-take" attempts, I just used some of them for the prolonged soaking tests instead of writing some more on the bottom third of the A5 page of the test sheet and then cut that part off to use for soaking.)

 

I'm not going to write or swab with other inks on the test sheet for ready comparison; and I'm also not going to bother much with searching for and then linking to either ink reviews previously published on FPN, or external sites with relevant information, other than perhaps my own reviews and posts on FPN if I happen to have just looked at them in a different browser tab for some reason.

 

So, that's quite a bit less than what I used to do for my "quickie reviews", which I've stopped doing quite a while back... because I find myself not enjoying doing them, and one of the (two) major reasons for that is I don't like making pen cleaning/maintenance "work" for myself. For a while I was prepared to use the same Pilot (or, alternatively, "international standard") converter in different pens, so as not to "waste" ink filling in multiple converters, but even that got old fast.

 

Fortunately — thanks to you! — out of the Sailor Fude de Mannen pen that you donated to the Aussie FPN pass-around box (but which I've since brutalised, sorry, to alter the angle of the nib's bend, and shorten the feed because it was touching the paper when writing at a low angle, etc.) I now have a pen that can write in a very wide range of line widths, including extremely fine lines, but also with a certain "character" that I like; and so that's now my primary test equipment for use in ink reviews, after ruining and/or discarding a number of other candidates. Whatever effect I cannot get out of using the ink in that pen, I guess I'll just leave off my "lazy" ink reviews.

Edited October 24, 2020 by A Smug Dill

[white_lotus]

Well I think this is a very good review.

 

Not an ink that would interest me though. I don't favor gray inks, and have a nice stash of black inks already.

[A Smug Dill]

  On 10/22/2020 at 9:18 PM, Eclipse157 said:

I have a few of the new Manyo inks on their way in sample form, including this one. I guess my expectations will pour over to Shirakashi, Kakitsubata, Ume and Sakura

 

 

Seems your and my preferences in ink colours are quite aligned! The four bottles I got are Chigaya, Ume, Shirakashi and Kakitsubata.

[Eclipse157]

  On 10/24/2020 at 2:03 AM, A Smug Dill said:

 

 

Seems your and my preferences in ink colours are quite aligned! The four bottles I got are Chigaya, Ume, Shirakashi and Kakitsubata.

 

It always feels good to find like-minded fellow human beings around

[keybers]

  On 10/22/2020 at 12:14 PM, A Smug Dill said:

after first introducing the product line in 2019

 

Excuse me, how can the product line have been introduced in 2019 when my bottle of Manyo Yomogi was produced in October 2018? It was introduced on the _Western_ market in late 2019 is all.

 

This actually soured me on the brand. I preordered this from La Couronne du Comte in Nov. 2019 and received my bottle (actually, two of them) in late January 2020. When I preorder stuff I expect it to be freshly produced—this is what preorders are for. But it appears that the Western market is a place for Japanese manufacturers to offload batch leftovers after the batch stopped selling in the domestic market. Hence also the scarcity, I imagine,—there is always a finite amount of stuff left over as opposed to situations where a product line is announced and then produced for some time keeping up with demand. I'm not saying I won't buy anything else from Sailor, but I have thus gained a motivation to always look for alternatives and be more inclined to buy something from a different brand, all other conditions being more or less equal.

 

[A Smug Dill]

  On 10/26/2020 at 3:14 PM, keybers said:

Excuse me, how can the product line have been introduced in 2019 when my bottle of Manyo Yomogi was produced in October 2018? It was introduced on the _Western_ market in late 2019 is all.

 

This actually soured me on the brand.

The production date of your bottle is 18 October 2019 as clearly shown. I'm afraid you're getting all worked up over nothing but your own misunderstanding and preconceived notions.

Edited October 26, 2020 by A Smug Dill

[keybers]

  On 10/26/2020 at 3:24 PM, A Smug Dill said:

The production date of your bottle is 18 October 2019 as clearly shown. I'm afraid you're getting all worked up over nothing but your own misunderstanding and preconceived notions.

Could you please let us know what the date is on the back of your bottle? It is my understanding that the last number in the sequence is the year.

[Intensity]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_and_time_notation_in_Japan

 

Year, Month,Day.

[keybers]

  On 10/26/2020 at 3:53 PM, Intensity said:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_and_time_notation_in_Japan

 

Year, Month,Day.

Didn't know that. I stand corrected

[LizEF]

As further confirmation, the date on the back of my Sailor Yama Dori box is: 16. 8. 30. That combination can only reasonably be interpreted as 2016 August 30th.

[keybers]

  On 10/26/2020 at 3:56 PM, LizEF said:

As further confirmation, the date on the back of my Sailor Yama Dori box is: 16. 8. 30. That combination can only reasonably be interpreted as 2016 August 30th.

Yes, of course, this makes sense.

[A Smug Dill]

  On 10/26/2020 at 3:49 PM, keybers said:

Could you please let us know what the date is on the back of your bottle? It is my understanding that the last number in the sequence is the year.

  

  On 10/26/2020 at 3:14 PM, keybers said:

But it appears that the Western market is a place for Japanese manufacturers to offload batch leftovers after the batch stopped selling in the domestic market. Hence also the scarcity, I imagine,

  
Source: Sailor Pen's English/Global web site
 
N.B. Not presently listed on Sailor Pen's Japanese web site, and in fact never was; I've been paying close and frequent attention to that web site for a couple of years now. 

Edited October 26, 2020 by A Smug Dill