Arigatô, Mr. Nagahara

Nagahara Nobuyoshi 1932-2015

In 1947 a 15 year-old boy went to work at the Sailor Pen Company in Hiroshima, Japan. He continued to work there for 64 years building a worldwide reputation as one of the finest fountain pen nib designers anywhere in the world. Nobuyoshi Nagahara, known as the “God of Fountain Pens” in Japan, passed away on March 11 of this year. This sad news came to me today with the arrival of Stationery Hobby Box (Shumi no bungu bako), issue 34. Following in the footsteps of his uncle and starting work as a boy in the Sailor factory, over the years he became a master craftsman of unparalleled genius, his reputation familiar to fountain pen aficionados all over the world. 

During my years of living in Japan I had several opportunities of meeting Mr. Nagahara at pen clinics and receiving advice about or adjustments to one or another of my several Sailor fountain pens. One might think it out of the question that such a respected craftsman would give ten or fifteen minutes of advice and help to lines of strangers, but that was Mr. Nagahara’s way at all of his clinics. I once asked if he would sign a page in the notebook I carried and with a laugh he took up my newly adjusted Sailor 1911, full of violet ink and dashed off his signature in the notebook.

Mr. Nagahara retired in 2011, leaving his son, Nagahara Yukio to take over his work at Sailor. In the true sense of traditional Japanese apprenticeship, there is little doubt that his 14 years of side-by-side work with his father guarantees that the Nagahara legacy is in good hands.

One of my favorite pens of Nagahara Nobuyoshi’s design is the susudake naginata in which the barrel and nib are encased in smoked bamboo. The process of smoking the bamboo over an open hearth is lengthy, sometimes carried over years at a time. The long absorption of smoke serves to harden the bamboo even more and to add elegant coloration to the grain. The result is called susudake, or smoked-stained bamboo. From this hard and beautifully colored bamboo, Mr. Nagahara made what is called the Susudake Naginata. The nib design is of 21k gold, long in body and slightly reminiscent of the old Japanese halberd or naginata.

Another Sailor favorite is the Sailor Profit 21 with its Naginata nib. What first caught my eye was the striking red and black body with gold trim, though it is not truly a red, more of an orangish red similar to persimmon—eyecatchingly beautiful in its elegant jet black, orangy-red and shiny gold trim. About the nib…One evening in Tokyo I was cleaning the pen and as will happen horribly on occasion, the pen slipped out of my hands and dropped like a missile, nib first to the hardwood floor. Any sharper and it would have stuck up quivering in the floor. I stood frozen in shock for half a minute imagining the newly blunted nib. No question it was badly damaged by the fall, and in a condition that required professional help. Three weeks later Mr. Nagahara was making an appearance at a pen clinic in Tokyo and I took the pen to him for repair. Apparently it was a simple fix for him, and within fifteen minutes he had the pen back to mint condition—and of course, no charge.

The article on Mr. Nagahara’s passing in Stationery Hobby Box suggests that for many, March 11, 2015 marked the end of an era.

Smoked Bamboo

A second look at the Sailor Susudake Naginata…

In the last few weeks of long years spent in Japan a process of winnowing began with the boxes, closets and shelves of things accumulated over time. Obvious that everything couldn’t be packed and shipped to Florida, but it was also obvious that some of those accumulations had achieved special value as tokens of memory, curious tidbits or in some cases an irreplaceable tool of daily life. There was enough to fill several boxes with hard to find objects of limited number, antique bits and pieces, each carrying an unmistakable imprint of Japan.

When it came to the packing of fountain pens, I counted nine Japanese pens, most of them Sailor. Each of the nine was treasured, used regularly and soon to be carefully wrapped and packed for shipping. But something was missing.

I found it a week later at Kingdom Note, a favorite pen shop in Shinjuku. Had someone asked before that what I was looking for, the answer would have been, “I’m not quite sure.”

The moment I saw the Sailor Susudake Naginata the answer came to me. It was a pen made by Japan’s ‘god of the fountain pen’ Nobuyoshi Nagahara, bearing the patented mark of traditional Japanese craft, smoked bamboo—a pen that would mark my time in Japan and my love of Japanese craftsmanship.

For centuries bamboo has been a common element in Japanese life, showing up in poetry, proverbs, chopsticks, body armor, sword guards as well as handles, writing brushes, and following the line of poetry and writing brushes, fountain pens. The wood is known for its strength and resilience as well as beauty, and for those reasons found its place among the objects of daily life.

But the bamboo is not merely cut and quickly fashioned into useful pieces. There is a lengthy process of smoking the bamboo over an open hearth, sometimes for years at a time. The rarest examples of susudake passed as much as a hundred years absorbing the smoke of generations. This long absorption of smoke serves to harden the bamboo even more and to add elegant coloration to the grain. The result is called susudake, or smoked-stained bamboo.

From this hard and beautifully colored bamboo, Sailor’s master nib craftsman has made what is called the Susudake Naginata. Naginata is a nib design of Mr Nagahara’s, long in body and slightly reminiscent of the old Japanese halberd or naginata. The nib is 21k gold, and as with other Sailor fountain pens is offered in a range of sizes from fine to broad. For those desiring other nib sizes, John Mottishaw at Classic Fountain Pens offers the pen with a nib in a wider range of sizes.

Before buying and using the Sailor Susudake I had had some experience with another of the Naginata pens and knew it qualities well, so risk on that account was zero. Like most of my pens, the Susudake has a medium nib with good flex. The flow of ink is smooth with never a hint of skip, always generous, never stingy. It is precisely the kind of nib and ink flow that Mr Nagahara is long famous for.

In the ultimate sense, pleasure from this fountain pen comes with its value as a kind of totem or relic of the Japan years. It has its time in the weekly pen rotation, but when not inked up and lounging on my writing desk it sits displayed on its own shelf, resting on the backs of two small silver cats.

The photograph with the sample writing was done with Iroshizuku Yama-guri ink in a Faber-Castell journal.

Interested in the earlier Susudake post? Look here.

Smoke from the Hearth Fire

Even part-time visitors to these pages will know that Sailor fountain pens are a frequent topic here, and oftentimes if not a Sailor pen, then it might be Sailor ink. I can’t deny that I am a big fan of Sailor, but it comes from a backlog of good experiences with their pens and their ink, as well as several helpful and interesting talks with some of their star craftsmen. My several years of using Sailor made (tailor made) products have been very satisfying in terms of quality and dependability.

So, let me tell you about another of my tailor made Sailor fountain pens. I’ve said it before and by now you may even be mumbling, “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” but I’m just about crazy for the Naginata nibs designed and made by Nobuyoshi Nagahara, Sailor’s premier penmeister. One of his fountain pens I haven’t yet introduced here is one in a very traditional Japanese design made from specially treated bamboo. Of course, the nib is not bamboo, but 21K gold in the familiar long body common to the Naginata design, with a plastic head, or connection for the piston converter. It is the body, the barrel and cap of the pen that are made of bamboo.

Bamboo is a very hard wood, well-known for its ability to withstand pressure, to bend but rarely break. There is a process in which bamboo is both stained and strengthened from long exposure to the rising smoke from a hearth fire. This process is called SUSUDAKE and nowadays refers to bamboo which has been exposed to the process. Some will tell you that it takes 100 years to make the best quality susudake, but that is probably for rare objects. In the traditional Japanese home with its irori, or sunken hearth, cooking pots were hung from a hook suspended from an overheard bamboo pole. It was from this that Japanese craftsmen learned to use the hardened, smoke-stained bamboo to make things like sword guards, tea ceremony tools and handles for writing brushes.

At Sailor, Nagahara-san makes fountain pens using such bamboo. These are very beautiful pens, and unmistakably Japanese in both appearance and in the feeling of the aged bamboo.

One of these days when I leave Japan, I expect that my Sailor Susudake Naginata will be a treasured touchstone of my time here, something recognizable immediately as purely Japanese.