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]
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]