Sailor Pen

Sailor traces its name to a chance encounter: in 1911, Kyugoro Sakata was introduced to the fountain pen by a visiting British sailor, and the pen so impressed him that he and his brother built a company around it in Hiroshima the same year. The company went on to produce the first fountain pen with a gold nib made in Japan, became the first Japanese manufacturer of ballpoint pens in 1948, invented cartridge-ink technology in 1954 (releasing it publicly in 1958), and developed 21-karat gold nibs in the 1960s — a run of firsts that put a small Hiroshima workshop at the center of Japan's writing-instrument industry.

Production has stayed rooted in Kure, Hiroshima Prefecture, through more than a century of the company's history; Sailor's head office itself moved back to Kure in April 2021 after decades based in Tokyo, and the company marked a rebuilt Hiroshima factory facility with a ceremony in October 2022. Sailor is publicly traded on the Tokyo Stock Exchange today, manufacturing fountain pens (the 1911 and Pro Gear lines among them), ballpoints, dip pens, mechanical pencils, and its own bottled inks.

The gold nib remains the house's signature: Sailor grinds and tunes its own nibs in-house, in widths and shapes (including its distinctive angled Naginata-style cuts) not commonly offered by Western makers, and the company's "where to buy" network of authorized dealers spans Japan and international pen specialists.