Growing up in a computerized world, I’ve never really thought too much about the problems faced by people using typewriters.
It’s pretty damn hard to make a Japanese typewriter (known in Japanese as a 和文タイプライター). Instead of the simple 26 letters in the English alphabet, Japanese has 48 hiragana, 48 katakana, and thousands and thousands of the Chinese-derived kanji characters.
Unsurprisingly, it’s really hard to come up with a typewriter that can incorporate 1,000+ characters, but people still tried their damndest to make it work.
In 1929, a man named Kyota Sugimoto invented the first Japanese typewriter and, in the decades that followed, many more people tried their hand at making a better Japanese typewriter.
They came in various shapes and sizes, but the underlying pricinple was more or less the same. You used a giant plate full of the 1,000+ characters included on the typewriter and gradually steered the plate to the character you wanted.
But it gets even more complicated. Some typewriters had interchangeable characters, some wrote vertically, others wrote horizontally. Apparently, certain characters, because of their complexity and the surface area, required more force than others. All in all, not very user friendly.
These typewriters might have given writing a certain formality and uniformity, but they were also basically slower than handwriting and really, really complicated.
Fortunately nowadays, Japanese people don’t have to deal with these cumbersome, complicated machines; computerized word processing has more or less solved the problem much more simply and elegantly than Japanese typewriters.
Still, there’s some mystique in these intricate devices. Even if they don’t make life especially convenient, they’re a fascinating relic of a time when Japanese was trying to bridge the gap into the modern world.
Read more: Gatunka – Japanese Typewriters