Japanese typewriter

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.^[1] He obtained the patent rights to the typewriter that he invented in 1929.^[2] Sugimoto's typewriter met its competition when the Oriental Typewriter was invented by Shimada Minokichi.^[3] The Otani Japanese Typewriter Company and Toshiba also released their own typewriters later.^[3]

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.^[4] 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.^[4] For this reason, typists were required to undergo specialized training, and typing documents was not part of the duties of the ordinary office worker.^[4]

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.
^ ^a ^b Mullaney, Thomas S. (2018). The Chinese Typewriter: A History. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. p. 205. ISBN 9780262036368.
^ ^a ^b ^c Gottlieb, Nanette (2013). Word-Processing Technology in Japan: Kanji and the Keyboard. Oxford: Routledge. pp. 10–11. ISBN 978-0700712229.