The Japanese Typewriter

Signs Publishing Co. · Melbourne, Victoria · Jun 21, 1920

FromAustraliasian Signs of the Times, Vol. 35, No. 25.

The Japanese Typewriter

OWING to the fact that a typewriter to be of any use at all in writing the Japanese language must have more than three thousand characters, it is obvious that only the most general principles of the ordinary machine could be applied. It was necessary to build a machine which contains so many special features as to be to all intents and purposes a new invention. In the writing of the Japanese language three distinct sets of characters are employed. Of these, two, the Katakapa and the Hirakana, are phonetic, each character designating a syllable. The third is the Kanji, or Chinese characters—ideographs—of which one must know three thousand or more in order to write the language at all well. These characters convey the same idea to both a Chinese and a Japanese, although the pronunciation is entirely different. This fact has an advantage in the case of typewriter making, as the same machines may be used by the Japanese and the Chinese.

When K. Sugimoto set about building his typewriter it was obvious from the first that the foreign model could not be followed. A machine having more than 3,000 key arms would be as cumbersome as a grand piano. He solved the difficulty by providing a movable arm which picks up the type from its section in the type tray, strikes it against the paper, and then deposits it back in its proper place. The average speed of experienced writers is from sixty to seventy words a minute, and one speed marvel has set a record of seventy-nine.