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]

A typist uses a Japanese typewriter

An example of the arrangement of characters for a Japanese typewriter (1935), arranged in Iroha order. Kanji are arranged based on their on'yomi.

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]

See also

• Chinese typewriter
• Japanese input method – Methods used to input Japanese characters on a computer