Ishimaru - Iwashita New Ginger
Ishimaru - Iwashita New Ginger - Ink drop
This is a fun, and in many ways unusual ink! Iwashita Foods makes a popular pickled ginger snack called Iwashita New Ginger, and created the Iwashita New Ginger Museum in Tochigi, a city just north of Tokyo. In 2021, they worked with Ishimaru Bunkoudou (Nagasaki) to create an ink to celebrate their beloved product. The ink was blended by Ken Takeda (author of two fantastic ink dictionaries, and creator of the Ken’s Night series of inks) using Tono & Lims base colors. This is the standard fountain pen version, but there is a silver shimmer glass nib version, as well.
Ink Swatches on Cosmo Air Light and Tomoe River
This is a beautiful blend of pinks with a powerful peach orange that develops in saturated areas. If you look at the box image, you’ll see that the ink swatches are strikingly similar to the actual Iwashita New Ginger product! This is also a scented ink. In my experience, scented inks rarely perform well in writing. They often suffer from heavy feathering and ink spread, but in this case, I didn’t find any problems at all! The scent of the liquid ink is perfectly ginger (I believe the ink uses actual ginger juice to create the scent, but I could be mistaken). There really is no noticeable scent while writing or on paper, but the bottle is unmistakably ginger. I don’t think I’ve seen the combination of a delicate sakura pink and a bold ginger orange previously. It’s quite beautiful!
Ink Swatches on Iroful and Takasago Bank papers
Despite being a scented ink, writing performance is consistently clean, crisp, and sharp in look, and comfortable in feel. There’s nice shading on all papers, but the orange stroke centers are only really strong on some papers. Flow was neutral to slightly wet, and both the color and scent easily cleaned out of convertors and piston barrels with no extra effort. You won’t have any worries or complaints about the performance.
Writing sample on Cosmo Air Snow paper
You can find this ink at Ishimaru stores or on their website (the site has an integrated freight forwarding service to make international ordering easy, too.) If you’re visiting Japan, Tochigi is a short distance north of Tokyo, and the Iwashita New Ginger Museum is a highly-rated attraction. They sell both the standard and the shimmering versions there, and on their website, as well. The museum is quirky in a fun way, and might make a great story to go with a very unusual ink for your collection!
Ishimaru - Iwashita New Ginger ink writing samples
Ishimaru - Iwashita New Ginger - Swatch Card
Ishimaru - Iwashita New Ginger - Comparisons
Ishimaru - Iwashita New Ginger 30 ml bottle