Picture of a Nippontype

[Dave Hughes]

Some nice photos taken by Simon Goode during his visit to the Kumamoto Shinbun (Newspaper) Museum in Japan.

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[Mechanic]

Producing single Japanese Letterpress characters on a keyboard operated casting machine is pretty straightforward.

People look at the Linotype keyboard and are a little taken aback by the 90 character keyboard, until you explain the layout. This is nothing compared to a keyboard that I saw, when I visited  Asahi Shimbun in Tokyo, in the  1970's. The keyboard was used to operate their Hell Digiset.

The keyboard had 240 keys. Each key could produce four different characters. The shifts to access the various characters were controlled by two foot pedals. None activated, first position. Left down, second position. Right down, third position. Both down, fourth position.

In English we can produce every word we want with 26 keys and one shift.

What was that song? "I think I'm turning Japanese." I think not.