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The first practical was invented by Kyota Sugimoto in 1915. Out of the thousands of
A blog post about Japanese typewriters
(includes pictures). ''Gatunka'', 2009. {{technology-stub Typewriters Japanese inventions 20th-century inventions
The first practical was invented by Kyota Sugimoto in 1915. Out of the thousands of kanji
are the logographic Chinese characters taken from the Chinese script and used in the writing of Japanese. They were made a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese and are still used, along with the subse ...
characters, Kyota's original typewriter
A typewriter is a mechanical or electromechanical machine for typing characters. Typically, a typewriter has an array of keys, and each one causes a different single character to be produced on paper by striking an inked ribbon selective ...
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
, commonly known as Toshiba and stylized as TOSHIBA, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. Its diversified products and services include power, industrial and social infrastructure systems ...
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
Romanization or romanisation, in linguistics, is the conversion of text from a different writing system to the Latin script, Roman (Latin) script, or a system for doing so. Methods of romanization include transliteration, for representing writ ...
version. For this reason, typists were required to undergo specialized training, and word-processing was not part of the duties of the ordinary office worker.
See also
*Chinese typewriter
A Chinese typewriter is a typewriter that can type Chinese script. Early European typewriters began appearing in the early 19th century. However, as the Chinese language uses a logographic writing system, fitting thousands of Chinese characters o ...
* Japanese input method
Japanese input methods are used to input Japanese characters on a computer.
There are two main methods of inputting Japanese on computers. One is via a romanized version of Japanese called ''rÅmaji'' (literally "Roman character"), and the ot ...
References
External links
A blog post about Japanese typewriters
(includes pictures). ''Gatunka'', 2009. {{technology-stub Typewriters Japanese inventions 20th-century inventions