Types in Japanese, Chinese + English. Toshiba Typewriter Model BW-2112 Serial no. 7227442 Do you have a Japanese, Chinese index typewriter for sale? Please contact me - davidherrerafilms@gmail.com. New Orleans typewriter collector.
They're arranged phonetically by most common "on-yomi" (or kun-yomi in some cases) according to the kana syllabary (many homophones, of course). Can't see the whole circumference of the cylinder but at about 0:30 it's clear that the order doubles back at the ring of mathematical symbols. Red characters help parse the readings. Last character to left of equal sign can be pronounced "kin" (exert) and the first character in next row "gin" (silver), then "ku" (suffer) in red followed by "kuu" (sky, empty), "kuma" (bear), "kun" (teachings, meaning [also the kun in kun-yomi]), "gun" (group), then "kei" (system) in red followed many, homophones of "kei". It's the same order in which (mostly compounded character) words in a normal Japanese monolingual dictionary for Japanese speakers would appear.
Technically, if Japanese had no Kanji and only either Hiragana or Katakana, it would be even simpler, since it's a syllabic alphabet meaning you could write the same text with much less characters.
Kanji contains meaning, and if you understand the meaning of each kanji then you can get so much more information out of the sentence. It also makes it easier to tell words apart. It also saves space. わたしのなまえはやまだです 私の名前は山田です See these two sentences are the same but the one with kanji is easier to read if you know the meaning of the kanji. Sort of like the top one I have to actually read it to understand it while the bottom one I understand as soon as I glance at it.
“How many words per minute can you type?” “I can type 35 words per minute on....” “That’s not very fast.” “... a Japanese typewriter.” “Holy shit!!! You’re hired!!”
This looks pretty inefficient but it's worth considering A) the operator isn't very skilled B) Japanese characters often pack a ton of meaning. the word "Today" is five keystrokes in English, and only two "今日" on this keyboard. Also Japanese doesn't really have word counts, because without spaces between words, there's no consensus on what counts as a separate word. They use characters instead. Certainly a far cry from the modern method of computer-assisted interpretation Japanese typists use nowadays, but I think this is one of the best case scenarios for a non-digital Japanese keyboard.
Surprisingly, the fastest typists are now Chinese. I guess it took sometime before they developed systems to compete and now beat English language typists. But, now they have, and I believe using several variants. I would guess japanese also have systems approaching - if not surpassing - English typing. I am sure a much faster English system could be developed, but that ship sailed long ago
@@Cheetorblz yeah, but those people make stuff that a common people cant read at all. Every single court stenographer has years in experience and they do not use the "normal" typing or neither the normal keyboards
Now imagine the typing speed of a Secretary perked on 5 cups of caffeinated green tea on rush hour, that typewriter must be rolling like a wheel at the casino!
I'm just imagining a woman at her desk, cigarette in her mouth, left hand finely adjusting the cylinder and the right hand just feathering that lever, like an experienced gunslinger from one of those wild west movies.
The fact that engineers can conceptualize, draw precise blueprints, and then build complex mechanical things will never cease to amaze me. Especially devices like this, built well before computer aided design.
It might interest you that Japan is home of the OCD. A group of (super)market entrepreneurs and executives bought a 7-11 franchise to get at the operations binders. At the first store, an executive physically at the pilot store phoned in EVERY SINGLE ITEM SOLD over the day each night. They hadn't figured out how to do inventory, so they just brute forced it.
> Studrnt Reading Japanese Computer typing instructions; Welcome to Japanese Typing 101 ■ To activate program home page please press any key. - Turning the japanees key barrel frantically & thinking; ***Where the hell is the "any" key? ***
They're the people that graduated with the aid of google so that's to be expected.. As technology progress, the amount of competent individual decreases
@@akaraikiriakatsuki3157 Not true or accurate at all. They are only more saturated, but the amount of competent engineers is increasing. Those that truly care about the subject use google and all types of media to educate themselves faster and more efficiently than any of their predecessors could. We are making crazy progress in so many fields. And quite a bit of that progress can be attributed to young engineers around the ages of 25-35.
Imagine walking into some Japanese advanced robotics applications lab and see everyone logging their data with these. "Why are you using antiquated typewriters?" "We don't trust logistics to digital hardware."
That sounds quite plausible, knowing Japan. They're often very cautious about adapting to new technology. I think even now, PC ownership isn't very high.
A Japanese printing company can use around 2000-3000 characters to type almost anything. A Chinese printing company would need more than that, about 5000-6000 characters, because Chinese characters generally have a more exact meaning and because Chinese doesn't have additional phonetic ''alphabet-like'' syllabic symbols like hiragana and katakana for grammar and writing names, they use separate characters for that. Therefore building a typewriter with the same design for writing Chinese as you can for writing Japanese is close to impossible.
Actually, not very complex from what you can see here. The plunger is fixed and the type has always to be centered to that; therefor you have to move that wheel from left to right. When you have selected the symbol you want to write, the whole row is just lifted before the plunger which then prints the symbol you have centered. The rows are offset in a way, that shows you the symbol in the front on a row which has different symbols beneath it, because of course the machine cant lift the row you are looking at but just the one directly in front of the color band
That feeling when the typewriter is really slow, but it's probably still faster than writing kanji EDIT: after several comments of people telling that kanji is not that slow to write, it seems that I was wrong about it being probable. But I do wonder how a person who is skilled in this machine would do
When I first came to Japan in 1981 these (or similar) were still being used in the office. Only a few skilled women could "type" like this so most business was done by writing by hand. Very soon after this computers changed everything. Obviously the person in this video has no idea what they are typing and that is not close to being Japanese but the sounds the machines make are very nostalgic to me.
@@mjaysaratchandra8196 The fact that character has its own word doesn't mean it can't be used in compound words like normal. My point was that as far as I can see Japanese has more characters than Chinese that are basically only used in compound words.
@@mjaysaratchandra8196 It can be a little frustrating to go to the trouble of learning a whole character and its meaning, yes character can have meaning, but not a word, and not be able to use it at all without learning another character.
I'm intrigued: was your mother in a diplomatic or intelligence corps, or was her profession related to international business? Was she a citizen or immigrant from an Asian country, or did she learn Japanese/Chinese for school or work?
I can't believe I've lived this long without ever wondering what a Japanese typewriter would look like. Amazingly enough, that knob-and-slider action seems both more ergonomic and faster to use than our latin keyboards.
you can type japanese by typing by *basically* typing it's romaji (of course you need a autofill dictionary since there's lots of kanji with the same readings)
@@thecsofans6957 Printer nowadays have the wireless feature where it connect to any device with Bluetooth, so the need to have PC is not as critical for functioning
This is a lovely video. Thank you. The Japanese written language is incredibly complex. And yet, the Japanese spoken laguage is incredibly concise. We live in a world of juxtapositions.
I don't think Japanese students wrote theses on these things. Typewriters in China and Japan were almost always found in offices. In fact, in China, typewriters had to be registered and it was illegal to have one for personal use, whereas in Japan the only people who used it were those trained to work with them.
Clearly, the engineers of Toshiba tried to make this product as usable and compact as possible. Probably, the kanji display rows background was clearer when new on the character drum selector, but the typist would have a good indication what kanji was pulsing with the arrow indicator over the desired row and row field on the selector. A very nice and pretty machine, really. :) However, the wappuro machines and software were really an urgent need when developed and spread in the commerce and offices first, and later distributed among the general public.
A Japanese journalist once told me that the ease with which Japanese people can type out Kanji on electronic devices is actually slowly killing the writing abilities of Japanese people. Even my wife said that she remembers how to write much less Kanji then when she was in High School, mainly because almost everything is typed once you enter the workforce. She discovered this when applying for a job at some kind of school textbook company, which required her to take a Kanji test. You are correct that it was urgently needed back then but it seems to have come full circle in that it is now starting to do harm. Having said that, the ENglish speaking world is no better. I tend to flare up a bit whenever I read online comments from all kinds of people, including some very intelligent ones, who cannot be bothered to differentiate "your" and "you're" or "there" and "their". Most likely only following the auto-suggest on their devices.
@@ondrejsedlak4935 As an aside, My wife and I used to write notes to each other in cursive so the grand kids couldn't read them. :) Every new generation has lost something. ( My brother told me while in the military that's why they start a war every 20 years so the old generals can pass on their expertise to the recruits .)
Bao’s family is like an electric scatter brush for the treatment of miscellaneous problems. It is suitable for the purpose of being just. The brothers plan to discuss the type of Wakita Kazuo’s obstacles. Translation for 0:49
I can't imagine too much faster, because I feel like you have to make sure you're lined up properly or get a bad stamp. Maybe ~1.5 a second if you spent years on it. At least they won't have to worry about having to sort it in the most inconvenient order to force you to slow down. _Looking at you QWERTY_
That would be nice video or not? Some bad ass old Office lady that worked on this monster. It's like watching old Chinese people working with a abacus 🧮 We had once such guy invented by our Prof. Made little contest chinese veggie seller with abacus Vs. German students with calculator. You could guess 😁 Old guy playing with wood marbles won 😍
@@jellomaster5629 Well, at least the way I've heard it is that QWERTY was designed to separate commonly used letters to forcibly slow down the rate at which you type. Otherwise typewriters would mess up.
@@thedemonslayer51 Sorta, it was designed to separate commonly used letters to try to prevent two adjacent keys from being struck so close together that they jammed the mechanism. It's not an issue on anything except mechanical typewriters but the layout stuck. If you're looking for a layout designed for speed, the DVORAK layout is apparently great for that. I've never used it personally so I don't know for sure
ランダムに打っているようですが 0:47「座談」 1:14 「自失」は単語として成立しています You seem to be typing randomly, but 0:47 「座談」(ZADAN) "round‐table talk" and 1:14 「自失」(JISITSU) "lose yourself" are words that work.
"The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type any given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare." I guess that applies to Japanese too.
What an extraordinary machine. According to the Virtual Typewriter Museum, Toshiba made this kind of typewriter from 1940 to 1954. Thanks for posting this to RU-vid.
Something about japanese product design really resonates with me. Things are ordered and formed in a way that to me is very organic, harmonious and clean. All the elements work together to form the total aesthetic. I find it all over the place across various products and even the things that make up the products themselves. Somehow too, written and spoken japanese also follow this philosophy. I really admire that.
Assuming this isn't a joke, this would be fairly trivial to make as a keyboard, actually. Easier than building this typewriter, at least. I'm not sure it would be an improvement over kana input with computer interpretation, which seems to be the fastest way to type Japanese right now, but it's worth a shot :)
@@f__kyoudegenerates because you are used to it. Ask somebody who hasn't used one before to type a one page text. It will take a few good seconds to find each character. I was 4 when I typed first, and I was using only the right index finger. When computers became cheap enough in the late 90s, everybody new to it was doing the same right index only typing, like a child. Even today, a lot of people don't use all fingers and type with indexes only. A trained japanese could type with this machine fast enough, those characters are syllables if I am not mistaking, possibly words or part of words.
Wow! Amazing how compact they were able to make such a thing. Looks like smooth and easy gliding to the next character, too! Marty wasn't kidding when he said that "all the best stuff is made in Japan"! Thanks for sharing this awesome part of your collection with us, it's a beautiful bit of mechanical goodness :)
Ha ha ha! He was just choosing random things and pressing the key. Using this machine for real would be slow even for an expert, none of whom are still alive today, I'm sure.
Someone should make a mechanical Unicode typewriter. I'm imagining a giant wheel made up of drums like this one, with a typewriter essentially "riding" the rim so the drum you select can lock in to the regular mechanism.
You would need to be able to keep adding code pages to keep up with changes to the standard, but that's a great idea ... for like an art installation or something.
@@brandonlewis2599 Interesting point... I wonder if there's some way a wheel can be constructed so that its radius can be increased. I guess it would be easier to use some sort of track / conveyor belt, so you could just extend it in length.
@@metacob That would make it pretty slow and complex, i like the idea as an art instalation though, you'd probably have to walk into the typewriter with all the structural elements to keep it from collapsing
This video answer a question I asked to myself since I started to study Japanese language ten years ago: how a Japanese typewriter looked like and was it even possible to write Japanese on typewriter before the creation of computers? Greatings from France !
@@caminoprojectUS You realize that you could have simply physically switched the keys and changed the keyboard layout to any other system of your preference, right?
Given that most languages have only around 1000 words that are used in day-to-day communication, that's probably all that you would need. Obviously that does nothing to help in the cases of the 10's of thousands of technical words that aren't in that 1000.
@@FreeManFreeThought Characters are not words. The kanji characters have a meaning, yes, but they are not all words. For more technical terms you often use 3 or 4 kanji chracters.
During that time Japan build all types of devices for Japanese market by themselves localising it according to Japanese needs by themselves they just kept Latin alphabet as it would be necessary for business or government transactions.
Beautiful type writer, and the fonts are tastefully carved. Too bad there might be some problem for all strikes to miss upper portion. Would have been better if they had designed it to have a foot driven striker for freeing up both hands to maneuver for characters.
I had just remembered that ever since my grandmother taught me how to use a typewriter more than 20 years ago, I had a question about how a Japanese typewriter would work, and now thanks to RU-vid I know the answer.
To Japanese people: 1.) Were such typewriters used frequently in Japan? 2.) Doesn't it take a lot of time to search for the character you need on the cylinder? How fast is writing on such a thing compared to writing in a western language on a typewriter with latin alphabet?
I gather it was only a device for use in a business office, by specially trained typists. I get the impression that the green columns are intended as a reference key to make finding characters easier, and there's probably some commonality in meaning or reading that would be much more obvious to a native speaker. But these were not fast machines to use.
@@nonamenoname2618 Not that I'm aware of. Due to the nature of the writing system, the only ways to make it easier would be to eliminate the kanji characters, restricting it to hiragana, katakana, and Roman letters. Such a typewriter would still be about three times as complex as a normal Western type.
Basically the problem of Japanese machine typing remained unsolved until electronic word processors with integrated printers appeared. I think fully mechanical machines like this were used for something very official that has to be printed but only few copies are needed that it doesn’t make sense to use printing presses.
I've seen some pics of the WWII Japanese military letters typed in Kana only. I believe it was typed by a typewriter similar to QWERTY since there are less than 50 Kanas. But people need to be very careful in making sentences to avoid misunderstanding, especially for the military.
The phrase "Chinese typewriter" is an older joke in engineering referring to something extremely complicated, but this actually looks like a pretty simple concept. One button, one hammer. A clever arrangement with Japanese elegance.
I collected typewriters years ago (as did my ex who's still a good friend) and when browsing online for antique typewriters I stumbled upon one probably about a decade older than this. The $23,000 price tag drove me to only admire it, but I'd all but kill to get one of these in my collection.
The Chinese writer Lin yutang once built a typewriter himself, the machine makes typing 90;000 Chinese characters possible, using a unique combinatory system. The inventor of the machine went bankrupt for building it, an American company named Carl E. Krum was commissioned to build the prototype, only finding out that no one was willing to finance the mass production of it because of the high manufacture cost. The prototype was lost when the author moved from one house to another. If only could rebuild the machine, it would be great to see an analog machine for type Chinese, the design was truly ingenious.
@@collectioneur Yes, because I spent years studying English and English literature in University, but when it comes to scriptio continua in a foreign language, it's hard to tell things apart if you're not fluent. And I would know, because English isn't my native language. From experience, Japanese is a generally simple language to learn (conversationally) with the necessity of kanji to break words apart, but I'm saying that kanji could have theoretically been abolished, making it easier to read as a result. But at least there's always furigana.
This got me curious about Japanese typing history in general. Like how widespread these were? When were they adopted and in what context? How was the transition to computers? and so many more questions. I would greatly appriciate any book recomendations about the subject.
I only have a rudimentary knowledge of the history but it seems like the first JP typewriters are from the 1910s-1920s with a sheet of characters instead of a wheel. I don't know for sure how common they were by WWII, but by the mid-century they were standard in offices. Typewriter users seem to have been more specialized than in the West. By the '70s or early 80s electronic typewriters came out, using systems more like modern keyboards, including the use of Latin letters to phonetically type out words which then get transferred to characters. In the 80s computers came out of course, but early systems didn't support kanji which led to the MSX architecture which could handle kanji being adopted as a de facto standard.
@@bureidokaiza2829 Also interestingly enough, Japan was one of the first countries to use email for early mobile phone messaging, as opposed to SMS. Reason being the SMS protocol at the time, couldn't handle multi-byte ASCII characters required for Kanji, Hiragana and Katakana, whereas email already could. In that respect, Japanese mobile communication was ahead of the world, when they were still relying on SMS. By the mid 2000's however, SMS was updated to handle complex ASCII sets, so using email from that point on in Japan was kind of redundant but it is still widely used in Japan, along with standard SMS.
Thank you for making the Japanese typewriter into a beautiful video. It is very retro and cool. Toshiba is also the company that made the world's first Japanese word processor. As a result, we can create Japanese sentences while typing. This feat must have been made possible by the company's efforts in creating the typewriter. 和文タイプライタをきれいな動画にしていただき有難うございます。とてもレトロでかっこいいです。 東芝は、世界初の日本語ワードプロセッサを作った企業でもあります。このおかげで、タイプしながら日本語の文章が作れるようになりました。この偉業も、タイプライターを作った企業努力があってのことでしょう。
@@takatamiyagawa5688 True: but I’m assuming the mechanics of this keyboard would be different from a QWERTY keyboard. And, speaking as a lefty, myself? I feel the QWERTY one ALSO needs work: certainly in where the enter key is …
Interesting mechanism. Rotary/linear selector.Lift mechanism lifts the line of type. Simple hammer lever strikes. Ribbon lift probably similar to a regular typewriter, or linked to the line lifter. Normal escapement. I used to be a typewriter mechanic on IBM golfball machines. Fun.
It’s crazy to think that they could conduct 5-6 years of a world war with only this, while the allies could type exponentially faster on convential Latin Typewriters.
For the most part, they would hand-write documents for military use; it's almost as fast and many more people knew how. Typewriting was only for neatness. Radio communications was often using a variant of Morse code called Wabun, which essentially encodes kana characters rather than kanji, and the encryption systems the Japanese used were also based on a romanisation of kana.
I know this is not really related to this video, but I would really appreciate some advice form you guys. I've a 1915 Hammond Multiplex. It looks all glossy and nice, I've oiled the machine, gave it a fresh ribbon and all parts seem to be moving freely and smoothly. However, it's not making any imprint... The hammer in the back doesn't seem to be hitting the back of the impression strip hard enough and I don't know how to fix it. Any advice?
@@TypewriterCollector Thank you for the quick response! I'll film and send the video as soon as I get to the house where the machine's at, likely tomorrow morning.
和文タイプライター(Japanese Typewriter）に搭載される文字数は約2000です。文字の配列は共通化されていますが、それでもその中から文字をファインダーで選択して打ち込む作業は容易ではありません。故に、和文タイプライターは商工会が定める専用の資格がありました。当時の日本において、女性が職を得るには最適な技能職の一つであったため、多くの女性が和文タイプライターの資格を得て社会に進出していきました。 日本語の文字数の多さと規則の複雑さから、タイプライターの電子化（Japanese word processor device)の普及は1980年代まで待たなければなりません。 A Japanese typewriter has about 2000 characters. Although the arrangement of the characters is standardized, it is still not easy to select and type the characters from among them using a finder. For this reason, Japanese typewriters had special qualifications set by the Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Since it was one of the best technical jobs for women in Japan at that time, many women became certified as Japanese typewriters and entered the society. Due to the large number of characters in Japanese and the complexity of the rules, electronic typewriters (Japanese word processor devices) did not become popular until the 1980s. Translated with DeepL
Its amazing how japan has never been like "okay guys we need to figure out a better system here" Seems like this typewriter would have been the catalyst for a change in the writing system if anything.
i wish they'd just accept romanji and be done with it. don't change anything, just... learn romanji and slowly transition to it as the main method over a century or whatever. that way i'd be able to read and understand their stuff. i'm never going to learn the runes.
Thanks to Google recommendations, sad there are no drawings or physical disassembly. 🤔although I reviewed it more carefully and everything became clear)
