A story of how I got hold of my bottle of asa-gao iroshizuku ink.
For a long time, I was using the Pelikan 4001 Blue-Black (packed in 62.5 mℓ bottles). This was a relative cheap and wonderful work horse ink that I used for my Pelikan Souverän M400. As seen in the sample scribbles from nearly 13 years ago, the colour is lovely.
But the recent years of using the same make of ink saw a general degradation. Gone was the blue---what was left behind was some ugly fading gray mess that I found to be utterly disgusting and unreflective of what it used to be. It might have been due to an exceptionally old batch of ink (the bottle was white capped instead of black), or it could be due to my changing taste, I just didn't like what I saw.
It also didn't help that the new Pelikan inks were more complicated. While Pelikan 4001 inks are available now (albeit in smaller than 62.5 mℓ bottles after their rebranding), they were much harder to find in SIN city. Much of the Pelikan ink series revolved around their ``Edelstein'' series, which all had wonderfully misleading colour names, super high price point (we're talking SGD30 vs SGD4 here), and in smaller quantities (50 mℓ vs 62.5 mℓ, resulting in a comparisong of 0.60 SGD/mℓ compared to 0.064 SGD/mℓ) during a time where I was more price conscious.
Which brings me to today (or thereabouts). I was running very low on my blue-black ink, and decided to finally look for a replacement. I didn't bother with trying to hunt down the Pelikan stuff, but instead turned to the iroshizuku series of inks from Pilot. The price point was similar to that of the Pelikan Edelstein series, and had similar wacky abstract names. But there was one big difference that swayed me towards going for the iroshizuku inks.
I knew I could find them easily.
I saw them in Tokyu Hands before, and I was pretty sure that I had seen them in Books Kinokuniya as well; a prior search online also revealed CityLuxe as another potential source with physical presence (I've not physically checked them out). As a brand presence, Japan's Pilot was definitely more visible compared to Germany's Pelikan in SIN city.
And so I found myself en route via bus to Jewel Changi, where a larger Tokyu Hands branch was at. The trip was not worthy of mention, other than the observation that there were still people in this time and age who would watch videos at full volume in a public but enclosed area with no headphones. I zoomed in to the store, and went to where I remembered they stored the inks (second store floor), and checked out the asa-gao labelled drawer.
Wait a minute---that's no asa-gao! It was a yama-guri for some reason. That made no sense... and so I looked about. There were 15 mℓ bottles of asa-gao next to the transparent drawers for the 50 mℓ bottles, but those were sold more dear with stranger requirements (need to purchase 3 at once for a grand total of about SGD33, which works out to 0.73 SGD/mℓ, compared to the 0.44 SGD/mℓ for the 50 mℓ bottle at about SGD22), and there was no way to tell if one could buy three of the same colour in the first place. I looked about as much as I could, and was going to settle for a tsuki-yo (sort of a more blue type of blue-black) instead. As I walked about, I made a side discovery of the black 4.0--8.5mm uniPAINT marker PX-30 was from Tokyu Hands instead of Popular, and picked two up.
Then I went over to the fountain pens corner and just browsed the display drawers. And there, tucked in a little unnoticed corner, was a 50 mℓ bottle of asa-gao just sitting there, without its gray string necktie.
I was... shocked, to put it mildly. It fuelled my hopes, and so I boldly asked the staff member who was operating the automated engraving machine if there were any more asa-gao stocks left as I could not find any among the drawers. He acknowledged my question and told me to wait a little as he was servicing the other customer's engraving requests. I nodded in assent, and watched him multitask on the controlling computer to pull up their internal stock take. After settling the other customer's needs, he turned to me and informed me that the system said that they still had stock, and that he would head out to the stacks to find it for me.
I waited eagerly.
He came back after a while with an ashen look on his face, apologetically telling me that he could not locate the stock.
This was when I pointed out that bottle in the corner of the display drawer, and asked him if that counted as being part of the stock as well. There was a chance that it was part of the display and not for sale---it was a display drawer for fountain pens after all, possibly with the ink wells surrounding them as a kind of decoration.
He was a bit stunned, did a double-take, and realised that the bottle was indeed of asa-gao after removing it from the drawer to examine it. And he said that yes it was that stock that the system said they had---he hadn't realised that they would put a bottle so far away from the rest of the bottles.
I thanked him profusely, and headed off to the cashier's on the first store floor and paid for my purchase.
To say I was delighted is probably a severe understatement. I could only thank God quietly for having such good fortune. I ended my time in Jewel Changi by heading off to NY Verdan Bar and Grill, where I enjoyed a lovely steak, tater tots, apple cider, and a tiramisu.
The bus trip home was also not very noteworthy, other than the further observation of people still watching videos on their phones at full volume in public, coupled with singing(?!) in the bus.
🤦♂️
I changed the ink on my Pelikan Souverän M400, and wrote a new dead-tree journal entry. The colour difference was literal night and day (asa-gao literally means ``Morning Glory''). Since it is my dead-tree journal, I can't really post any samples here. Take my word that it is a much brighter blue than the blue-black from the scribble samples from before.
This entry is starting to run a little too long, so I'll just add one last point before posting it: I could have gone through this entire purchasing process online, but I don't see a need to do so when I live in a place as accessible as SIN city. Besides, it's yet another 4-day weekend---I do need to get out of the apartment to do something just to ensure I don't get a fat ass.
Anyway, it's getting real late. It's still a public holiday... today (Tue), and I would like to do some stuff later on too. And thus, sleep is still needed, remembering that I generally do not sleep past sun-up.
Till the next update then.
Edit: Here's a small scan of the sample after I have had some sleep:
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