But seeing the amazing results some of these sketch artists, I decided to give these bent nib pens another chance and went to the local stationery shop here in Tokyo to find Sailor's Fude de Mannen which I knew was readily available here since I had seen it in shops before.

I was hoping to find the Profit version of this pen because it has a clip and will fit in my shirt pocket, but the local shop only carried the long version with no clip, and I didn't want to travel all over Tokyo looking for a pen.

The one I found was available in green, pink, brown and white. I chose the brown one; if it was going to stick way out of my shirt pocket, at least it would be a fairly conservative color that didn't stand out. It came with the nib bent at a 40 degree angle.

It cost 1,000 yen or roughly 9.25 USD at the current exchange rate (in 2019). One advantage of living in Japan is that stuff made in Japan is cheaper here.

Two ink cartridges of water-soluble ink came with this pen, but I discarded them and put in a Sailor Fountain Pen Converter and filled it with Platinum carbon ink which has always been my choice for waterproof ink.

This pen will give a variety of line widths depending on the angle you hold it. It will go from fine lines to extremely wide strokes. No other pen can get such line width variation.

Still, I wished that I could have found the shorter Profit version with a clip. Then it hit me that the nib section might just fit in my Sailor Profit Brush Pen.

So I tried it, and it worked! The threads were exactly the same and the nib sections were interchangeable.

Of course, the brown nib section doesn't match the black barrel, but I'm already accustomed to this look because several of my old black fountain pens have nib sections which have turned brown with age.

Now my Fude de Mannen has a clip and will fit in my shirt pocket for quick sketching, but I must admit that there is a trade-off. Pens that are made of cheap plastic and have extra long barrels were designed that way for a reason; they are light-weight and better balanced for drawing.

If you carry your drawing pens in a bag rather than in your shirt pocket, and don't care about how they look, then the long inexpensive versions are better.

How do you pronounce Fude de Mannen?

Fude de Mannen is admittedly a crazy name, and neither the meaning nor the pronunciation are apparent unless you know a little Japanese. So let me untangle it here with a mini Japanese lesson:

The Japanese word for fountain pen is MAN NEN HITSU (pronounced MAHN-NEN-HEE-TSOO).

It means ten thousand year brush, or the brush that ain't gonna wear out any time soon.

It doesn't take a whole lot of imagination to figure out why they chose this name in the late 1800's when everyone was writing with a brush.

Kanji characters were imported from China many years ago, and there's often more than one way to read them, which can cause confusion even with Japanese readers who might know what a word means without knowing how to pronounce it.

That last kanji for brush (which kinda looks like a brush) can be read either HITSU (pronounced HEE-TSOO) or FUDE (pronounced FOO-DEH) depending on the context. In this word it is HITSU.

Sailor replaced these kanji with hiragana (simpler Japanese characters), rearranged them, used FUDE instead of HITSU, and inserted DE to come up with the name FUDE DE MAN NEN (pronounced FOO-DEH-DEH-MAHN-NEN).

You pronounce the MAHN and NEN with two separate n sounds as in the pair of words on next rather than one run-together n sound as you would hear in the word honesty.

DE is a particle which means by means of. It normally appears as a hiragana character, but Sailor used alphabetic characters instead for a slightly jarring result.

So the meaning is basically unchanged, and tells us that this is a way to write like a brush by using a fountain pen. Well, I suppose that it would literally mean ten thousand years by means of a brush.

In the image above I have included the corresponding kanji characters so you can compare it with the image above.

The next few pages will be about developments which kind of bumped fude nib pens off the radar for a while in my life, but these pens will come back and become my main sketching tool several months later. I write about this a few pages later in Enter the Chinese bent nib fountain pen.

Note about Amazon links: If you click on a link and buy something at Amazon, a few pennies per dollar goes into my Amazon account, so instead of letting Amazon keep it all, you can pry a few pennies from their fingers make them share it with me. Any other vendor links I may put on this website are just for your convenience.