Review: a cheap, customizable Japanese fountain pen

plus: cutting-edge Fastentron screw-tech

This is the Fonte Biiro.

The Biiro is a (relatively) inexpensive Japanese fountain pen that perfectly embodies my favorite type of pen design: gimmick-forward. Gimmicks are popular because they work; a gimmick takes a new pen design from “that’s nice but I have enough pens right now” to “you’re telling me it has a new kind of clip using proprietary cliptronic technology developed by clipgineers from the Stuttgart Institute for Clipkraft? I NEED IT FOR WORK!”

Here, the main gimmick is that you buy the pen body and the finials separately in order to customize the color scheme of the pen. It’s great if you like the elegant color combinations of fancy Japanese pens but also don’t want to have to explain to your spouse that you spent $600 on a new pen with “I know what you’re going to say, but hear me out: it’s a slightly different blue.”

I bought the Biiro at the Maido in San Francisco. The pen costs $30 and the finials—which have no functional purpose—cost $6. This makes the pen fairly well-priced and the finials comically overpriced, unless the light blue ones I bought are actually made of sapphire which, like, probably not.

The bottom finial slides on; the top finial just screws on. This is kinda anticlimactic.

Like, I don’t know exactly what I was expecting here, but I think I was hoping for more showmanship. Maybe the part I can’t read on the box says that you attach them using cutting-edge Fastentron screw-tech developed by Fonte’s in-house material scientists, in which case it’s amazing and I love it.

Size-wise, this is pen is small but not a pocket pen, like those in-between bagels that are neither regular bagels nor Bagel Bites. Unlike those bagel mids, however, the in-between size works for me here and I can comfortably use it posted or unposted.

with a Kaweco Sport and Pineider Avatar

The nib is two-tone steel, size I Don’t Know But It’s Pretty Small, and it only comes in Extra Fine from what I can tell. It writes good but not great—some angles are finicky— and the nib has a little flex in it.

Another gimmick is that both the feed and the handle of the converter (it comes with a converter) are clear. I think this is the first time I’ve had clear versions of these and they’re pretty cool, honestly. I can’t be the only person who has longed for a fountain pen feed made of kiln-dried ectoplasm.

The pen is very lightweight. On my kitchen scale the inked and capped pen weighed in at 20 grams, 12 grams without the cap; a regular (plastic) Kaweco Sport is 10 grams, and an aluminum Sport is 21 grams (capped and inked for both). I like using the Biiro without the cap; it’s just long enough to be comfortable and the very light weight means I can write with it in my preferred position, which is prone on the couch in a position my wife calls Hey Doesn’t That Hurt Your Neck.

So, in conclusion: it’s a pretty good pen with a pretty good gimmick. It’s at a better price point and the gimmick is better-executed than on the Pineider Metropolis, the other pen we’ve reviewed with a similar concept.

You can buy the Fonte Biiro at the Maido next to the Kinokuniya in San Francisco’s Japantown (the Maido on the second floor, not the totally separate Maido on the first floor, yes this is confusing) and probably online if you can read Japanese as this pen does not seem to have much traction among English-language retailers.