There's a specific kind of panic that hits the moment you decide you want a fountain pen.
Maybe you watched one too many aesthetic desk-setup videos. Maybe a friend handed you theirs at a coffee shop and you felt the nib glide across the page and thought, wait, why does my ballpoint feel like dragging a nail through concrete compared to this? Whatever got you here, you're now standing at the edge of a genuinely huge decision tree — hundreds of brands, dozens of nib sizes, ink systems, price tags that range from "lunch money" to "car payment" — and somewhere in that noise, two names keep surfacing: Pilot Kakuno and Pilot Metropolitan.
Good news: your search is basically over. Both are excellent. Both are made by the same company. And both solve the exact same problem — getting a real fountain pen into your hand without gambling forty dollars on something that might write like garbage — in almost opposite ways.
Let's actually get into it.
The Short Version, For Those in a Hurry
The Kakuno is the friendly one. Lightweight, colorful, a little smiley face etched into the nib that somehow makes the whole experience feel less intimidating than it has any right to. It's the pen that makes fountain pens feel approachable.
The Metropolitan is the pen that makes people believe you know what you're doing. Cool metal body, understated design, the kind of object that looks like it costs three times what it actually does. It's the pen you graduate into once "is this thing even for me" stops being the question.
If you're buying your very first fountain pen ever — genuinely first, as in you've never held one before — start with the Kakuno. If you've dipped a toe in already, or you want something that reads as more "adult" on a desk or in a meeting, the Metropolitan is calling your name.
Now let's talk about why.
Why the Kakuno Exists (And Why It's Kind Of Brilliant)
Pilot didn't design the Kakuno for pen enthusiasts. They designed it, quite deliberately, for people who have never held a fountain pen and might be a little scared of the idea. Every single design decision reflects that.
Start with the nib. Most fountain pen nibs are smooth, polished metal — elegant, sure, but also a little cold and clinical if you're new to this. The Kakuno's nib has a tiny smiling face stamped into it. It sounds like a gimmick until you're sitting there writing your first few lines and you glance down and there's just... a little face, smiling back at you, like the pen itself is rooting for you. It's a small thing. It works anyway.
Then there's the grip. Fountain pens live and die by how you hold them — hold one wrong and the nib angle throws off your ink flow entirely. The Kakuno's grip section is triangular, not round, which sounds like it shouldn't matter until you realize it's quietly teaching your hand where to go. Kids learning to write with fountain pens in Japan often start on pens with exactly this kind of grip guide. It's not dumbing anything down — it's just removing one more way for a beginner to accidentally sabotage themselves.
The body is lightweight resin, not metal, which keeps the whole pen under the weight where your hand starts to cramp during a long writing session. And the colors — bright, playful, sometimes seasonal or limited-run designs — make it feel less like "serious writing equipment" and more like something you'd actually want sitting on your desk every day.
Practically speaking, here's what you're getting: a cartridge/converter fill system (meaning you can use pre-filled ink cartridges for zero mess, or add a converter later to draw ink from a bottle once you're ready to level up), a fine nib that's genuinely beginner-forgiving, and a piece of writing history from a company that's been making pens since 1918.
Why the Metropolitan Exists (And Why It Feels Like a Step Up)
If the Kakuno is designed to make fountain pens feel unintimidating, the Metropolitan is designed to make fountain pens feel inevitable — like of course you'd own one of these, obviously.
The body is brass, not resin. That single material change does more than you'd expect: it gives the pen real heft, a satisfying weight that resin simply can't replicate, and a durability that means this pen is going to outlast a lot of what's currently sitting in your desk drawer. Metal barrels also mean the Metropolitan photographs beautifully — there's a reason it shows up constantly in "aesthetic desk" content. Light catches metal in a way it just doesn't catch plastic.
Design-wise, the Metropolitan plays it cooler. Where the Kakuno leans playful, the Metropolitan leans refined — clean lines, a spring-loaded clip that actually holds firm in a shirt pocket or planner band, and pattern options that range from understated (matte black, brushed silver) to genuinely eye-catching (the Retro Pop line, animal print editions, metallic finishes). It's a pen that works equally well pulled out during a client meeting or tucked into a bullet journal at a coffee shop.
Here's the detail that actually matters most for how it writes: Pilot fits the Metropolitan with a nib that many reviewers and enthusiasts consider a genuine step above entry-level — smoother, more consistent ink flow, less of the initial "hard start" hesitation some ultra-cheap fountain pens suffer from. You're not just paying for the metal shell. You're paying for a nib that feels like it belongs to a pen twice the price.
It uses the same cartridge/converter system as the Kakuno, so functionally, upgrading from one to the other doesn't mean relearning how a fountain pen works — you're just upgrading the experience around a mechanism you already understand.
Head to Head: The Stuff That Actually Decides It
Weight. The Kakuno is noticeably lighter — great if you write for long stretches, journal daily, or you're handing this pen to a kid or a genuine first-timer who might find a heavier pen fatiguing. The Metropolitan's brass body gives it presence, but that presence comes with actual grams. Some people love that heft. Some people's hands disagree by hour two.
How it looks doing its job. The Kakuno announces itself as fun. It's unmistakably a "starting out" pen, in the best way — nobody's going to mistake it for anything other than what it is, and that's fine, because that's exactly the vibe it's going for. The Metropolitan doesn't announce anything. It just sits there looking like you've had good taste for years.
The learning curve. This one matters more than people expect. The Kakuno's triangular grip and lighter weight genuinely do make it easier to hold correctly on your first attempts. If you've never used a fountain pen and you're worried about "doing it wrong," that grip guide is doing real, quiet work for you. The Metropolitan assumes slightly more baseline comfort — not a lot more, but enough that going in completely cold, the Kakuno has a small, real edge.
Gifting. Both make excellent gifts, but for different people. The Kakuno is the better gift for a student, a journaling beginner, or genuinely anyone who's never touched a fountain pen and might be nervous about it. The Metropolitan is the better gift for someone who already writes a lot by hand, someone starting a new job, or anyone who'd appreciate an object that looks considered rather than novelty.
So, Which One Actually Goes First?
If you genuinely need a single, no-hedging answer: start with the Kakuno if this is truly your first fountain pen, ever. Let the smiley nib and the beginner-friendly grip do what they're designed to do. There's real value in learning the fundamentals — how to hold it, how ink flow actually behaves, why you shouldn't press down like you're using a ballpoint — on a pen that's forgiving of mistakes and doesn't feel precious.
Reach for the Metropolitan if you want your first fountain pen to also be a pen you'll still be reaching for in five years, or if the idea of writing with something that looks unmistakably "adult" and considered matters to you more than the training-wheels experience. Plenty of people skip the Kakuno entirely and start here, and they do just fine — the Metropolitan isn't hard to use, it's just slightly less forgiving of total beginner mistakes than the Kakuno is.
And if you're the type who can't pick just one — honestly, neither can we. A lot of fountain pen people end up owning both eventually: the Kakuno for casual, everyday, "I don't want to think about it" writing, and the Metropolitan for the moments where the pen itself is part of the point.
A Few Things Nobody Tells You Before Your First Fountain Pen
Don't buy the cheapest ink cartridges you can find online from an unknown brand. Stick with the manufacturer's own ink or a well-reviewed bottled ink until you understand how your specific pen behaves. Bad ink is the single most common reason people think they got "a bad pen" when really they just got bad ink.
Store it nib-up or lying flat, not nib-down, when you're not using it for a while. Gravity and ink don't need help finding new places to go.
Write with almost no pressure. This is the hardest habit to unlearn coming from ballpoints. A fountain pen nib is designed to glide — if you're pressing hard enough to feel resistance, you're doing more work than the pen needs you to, and you risk splaying a nib that's designed to flex only slightly.
Give it a week before you judge it. Your hand needs to adjust to the angle and pressure a fountain pen wants from you. A pen that feels awkward on day one very often feels completely natural by day five.
The Bottom Line
There's no wrong answer here, which is honestly rare in a hobby that can otherwise feel like an endless rabbit hole of options and opinions. The Kakuno and the Metropolitan solve the same problem from two completely different angles — one removes every possible barrier to entry, the other assumes you're ready and meets you there with something built to last.
Pick based on how you actually see yourself using it, not on which one photographs better on a shelf (though, let's be honest, they both photograph pretty well). Your handwriting — and your hand, after a few pages — will tell you the rest.
