Hello!
I’d like to formally introduce myself by making my first post about some very interesting information I found while perusing old Naver Cafe articles. Full credit for this article goes to 매직펜 (Magic Pen), who originally wrote this article on November 6, 2021 (Original Post).
This article breaks down, in minute detail, all the differences between Korea Pilot’s “2 Stage” Hi-Mecha Holder and Japan Pilot’s H-2005, which it is based off of.
Sharp Research Institute_ Naver Cafe.PDF.pdf (4.4 MB)
Here is a brief explanation of some terminology. Korea Pilot was known as 한국빠이롯드만년필, which translates to “Korea Pilot Fountain Pen.” In Korean, a common way to abbreviate phrases is to take the first character of each word in that phrase and refer to it in that way, so Korea Pilot is colloquially known as “Hanppa.” The “Han” comes from the first character of the Korean word for “Korea” - “Hanguk,” and the “ppa” comes from the old Korean word for “Pilot” - “Ppailodeu” (nowadays, it is written as 파이롯트, which is closer to how Pilot would be said in English).
The Hi-Mecha Holder Pencils are known as 히히포 in Korean, which translates to “hihipo.” While there is no definitive proof as to how they gained this nickname, I believe it just mirrors the internal model number of the Hi-Mecha Holders (HHP-100R, HHP-200R, HHP-200K, HHP-300S).
The craziest thing to me is this was sold at a whopping 3,000 Korean Won at the time, while the H-200X was sold at 2,000 Yen. Also, I do believe these were made domestically in Korea. They seem very rare to come by, even here. The last one listed was in 2023 and one before that in 2022. Nothing since.
It’s definitely a grail for me while I am here, if I can find one. From what I’ve gathered from only collecting for a few months is that domestically produced vintage mechanical pencils are fairly hard to come by. Most people find them in old stationery stores, but even then, a lot have closed down or have been cleared out of anything good by the time you get to them. When any do come up for sale, they never go for too much though.
Finally, here’s a pretty cool resource I’ve found (Ichepedia [Intangible Cultural Heritage Encyclopedia]). Apparently when the last Korea Pilot factory closed up shop in 2018, they donated pretty much everything in the factory to the city government, which then had it all catalogued and added to the national intangible cultural heritage collection. The search results in the link are everything that was donated from the factory.
Really, only the first 15 or so pages are of any interest. The rest are of the covers of files (not many contents) and, literally, discarded things like an old mask and a dirty waste bin. The first 9 pages show actual writing instruments. Pages 6-9 show mechanical pencils. Also, I wouldn’t consider this an exhaustive list of Korea Pilot’s productions by any means, just what was donated to the city government. Here and here are two interesting finds from my short investigation.