Japanese typewriter - Misplaced Pages

Typewriter used to produce Japanese script

The first practical Japanese typewriter (Japanese: 和文タイプライター, Hepburn: wabun taipuraitā) was invented by Kyota Sugimoto in 1915. Out of the thousands of kanji characters, Kyota's original typewriter used 2,400 of them. He obtained the patent rights to the typewriter that he invented in 1929. Sugimoto's typewriter met its competition when the Oriental Typewriter was invented by Shimada Minokichi. The Otani Japanese Typewriter Company and Toshiba also released their own typewriters later.

The Japanese typewriter was bulky and laborious to use. Unlike the English-language typewriter, which allows the typist to key in text quickly, one needed to locate and then retrieve the desired character from a large matrix of metal characters. For instance, to type a sentence, the typist would need to find and retrieve around 22 symbols from about three different character matrices, making the sentence longer to type than its romanized version. For this reason, typists were required to undergo specialized training, and typing documents was not part of the duties of the ordinary office worker.

References

Obendorf, Hartmut (2009). Minimalism: Designing Simplicity. Dordrecht: Springer Science & Business Media. p. 114. ISBN 9781848823709.
"Kyota Sugimoto (Japanese Typewriter)". Japan Patent Office. 7 October 2002. Retrieved 18 September 2022.
^ Mullaney, Thomas S. (2018). The Chinese Typewriter: A History. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. p. 205. ISBN 9780262036368.
^ Gottlieb, Nanette (2013). Word-Processing Technology in Japan: Kanji and the Keyboard. Oxford: Routledge. pp. 10–11. ISBN 978-0700712229.

External links

A blog post about Japanese typewriters (includes pictures). Gatunka, 2009.

v t e Typewriters
Manufacturers	Brother Commodore International E. Remington and Sons IBM Imperial Typewriter Company Oliver Typewriter Company Olivetti Royal Typewriter Company Sharp Silver Seiko Smith Corona Underwood Typewriter Company Xerox
Models	Blickensderfer typewriter Data Recall Diamond Hammond Typewriter Hansen Writing Ball IBM Selectric Sholes and Glidden typewriter Olivetti Valentine Hermes 3000
Prominent figures	Lucien Stephen Crandall Frank Haven Hall James Densmore Carlos Glidden Rasmus Malling-Hansen Henry Mill John Pratt Clarence Seamans Christopher Sholes James Fields Smathers Lyman Cornelius Smith Samuel W. Soulé Kyota Sugimoto Ettore Sottsass
Components	Keyboard layout AZERTY Dvorak Turkish F HCESAR QWERTY QWERTZ QZERTY Platen
Related equipment	Carbon paper Correction fluid Erasing shield Ink ribbon Stenotype Typewriter desk Typewriter eraser
Other scripts	Chinese Japanese Thai
Cultural and health aspects	Boston Typewriter Orchestra Copy typist Samizdat Speed typing contest The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog Touch typing

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