the president has been kidnapped by ninja pens
are you a bad enough dude to rescue the president
Hey, check it out: NINJA PEN!!!
This is the Sailor 1911L NINJA PEN. It is brand-new, so today we will be departing from this blog’s practice of reviewing some pen that I got years ago and has since been discontinued because no reason total mystery. You can actually buy this one!
To start: if you are reading this because YOU are a ninja and are like “finally, something for me,” I am sorry to inform you that this is not the case. You probably want something more like this Pineider.
By contrast, this Sailor is not FOR ninjas, but has a ninja ON it. This is a load-bearing difference, as a pen with a sparkly ninja on it would not be very practical for an actual ninja. This Sailor 1911L, then, is for dorks—and specifically, the aging kind of dork who saw this, remembered playing Shinobi and Ninja Gaiden a whole lot as a kid, and was like YES FINALLY A COOL SAILOR.
That’s right: Sailor finally made a pen that has a cool name and actually looks cool, as opposed to a pen that has a cool name that gets me to click through an ad but then is just, like, a single-color pen that costs $400.
I saw this pen being announced and it was the first time I’ve been really excited about one in a long time. I have wanted to try a Sailor but have never liked the simple styling enough to buy one given that there was always something else in a similar price point (and often a much lower one) with a snake or a skull on it or whatever, and much of their higher-end stuff that was more ornamental just wasn’t my taste. While there are other parts of life where I want a simpler, cleaner aesthetic, I generally prefer my pens to look like an AI hallucination.
Anyway, there are four ninjas: Gojoh, Tsuki, In, and the fourth one (Kevin?). I waited long enough that my first choice was sold out, but I was able to get the “In” model, which was a very close second. And whoo boy, it is a good pen. I’ve been using it for two weeks and have run it dry twice—and as I got a medium-fine nib, which is like an extra-fine in European nibs, that’s a lot of writing.
The ninja design is done in maki-e, which is Japanese for “ooh sparkles.” This technique starts with a ninja carving a self-portrait into the pen with the tip of a shuriken; the concave surfaces are then rolled in leftover gold dust from an out-of-control bachelorette party for color and sparkle. You can actually feel how this was applied, which is pretty cool.
Despite being the “L” in the “1911L” model name standing for “large,” it’s a very mid-sized pen.
The cap posts. Will posting the cap jack up the finish? I don’t know. And hey, why do you need to post a full-sized pen, anyway? I used to do this all the time and then one day was like “wait, why am I making the back of the pen heavier, that makes it harder to use” and I stopped. If you are some kind of huge-handed giant, I get it and I thank you for your critical role in protecting humanity from the goblins—but otherwise try not posting the pen, you’ll like it.
Anyway: it’s a cartridge/converter pen, which is like, who cares. I have no problem with this and generally agree with this analysis. I care a lot more about the nib, which is 21-karat gold (which, if you are unfamiliar with fine metals, means it is 21x softer than a carrot) and writes VERY WELL. It gives some feedback and some flex, which makes it my ideal nib for a relatively fast pace of writing.
I liked this pen so much that I immediately went to look at the non-ninja Sailors, all of which unfortunately confirmed my earlier view as just not my taste—they just look like nice pens, which is not my preference.
I found out about this ninja pen via Endless Pens and bought it when they were doing discounted pre-orders, which was a major contributing factor in me buying it given I didn’t have much familiarity with the brand. Pretty much every retailer now has this for about the same price, though some models are sold out depending on the retailer.