[Essay] Fountain Pens

I would like to write about the "flavor" of fountain pens.

These days, when I write, I almost exclusively use a computer, so I rarely write "by hand." Much less have I ever used a fountain pen to write.

While decluttering my house, I found a large amount of fountain pen ink, which prompted me to pull out the fountain pens I had bought but never used, leaving them tucked away in a pen case, and I tried writing some vertical text. Since I hadn't written by hand in a long time, I thought I might have forgotten how to write, but I was happy to find that I could write smoothly without needing to look up kanji. Of course, for representative difficult kanji like 'rose' (bara), I still have to look them up online...

As I wrote various things freely, just as they came to mind, it started to become somewhat fun. And I felt that with a fountain pen, writing vertically, rather than horizontally, allowed the characters to flow naturally, as if following gravity, like water. This was an unexpectedly interesting discovery.

Fountain pens are nice.

So, for the past few days, I've been having fun scribbling nonsense on small pieces of paper.

It seems there is a method of purification called "journaling."

It involves writing down whatever comes to mind directly onto paper, and it is also called "writing meditation." It is said that doing this reduces stress and sharpens intuition.

This is information I happened to see on Instagram yesterday, but recently, I have been doing this without even realizing it. Of course, it started with the fountain pen.

In life during the Reiwa era, when it comes to writing, the mainstream actions are flicking and tapping on smartphones or hitting keys on computers. The only handwriting I occasionally do is writing down my schedule or what happened that day in my planner like a diary using a mechanical pencil.

So, it had been so long since I last took the trouble to use a fountain pen to spell out vertical text in black ink that I couldn't even remember when I last did it.

Having played with it for the past few days, I am awakening to the joys of handwriting and the charm of this classic writing instrument, the fountain pen.

The sensation of a fountain pen running across paper is smooth and very pleasant. I like the slightly scratchy feeling of a pencil or mechanical pencil as it rubs against the paper, but this smooth, gliding sensation seems to even reduce the stress of writing.

If I were to book a comfortable inn in a quiet hot spring town, settle down, and bring along some 400-character manuscript paper to write with a fountain pen, I feel like I could write a good novel. I have a feeling that this kind of change in environment and the physical stimulation at hand might give me ideas different from usual (wishful thinking, haha).

Also, the appearance of the "traces" left behind is nice.
This might be the magic of "vertical writing with black ink," but there is something elegant about the visual of text written with a fountain pen.
My handwriting is so bad that it makes me sad, but even my characters seem to have a certain "flavor" when written with a fountain pen. This is likely just a visual illusion caused by the "vertical writing with black ink," but my own handwriting, which I usually only feel disgust for, sometimes looks like it has a cute, rounded charm.

Isn't it a happy change to be able to love something you usually can't?

Furthermore, vertical text written with a fountain pen looks like it forms a beautiful flow, like a waterfall cascading down from the top of a mountain toward the basin below.

An enchanting writing instrument that stimulates the senses of touch and sight in a way I haven't experienced before.

I intend to use my fountain pen more frequently from now on.