Japanese Toshiba Typewriter Model BW-2112 (2020) [video]

This is insane. Just finding a single character must be a real challenge.

What is the character ordering on these cylinders? I counted about 40 characters per row, and I’m guessing about 40 rows around the cylinder (1/4 of a cylinder is around 10 rows). So that’s about 1,600 characters.

How does this typewriter score for usability? In Kanji, ~1000 characters mean basic literacy, and 2000-2500 characters is “newspaper level” literacy.

I still cannot wrap my mind around mastering the written form of this language.

I really wish this other typewriter got a chance to enter mass production--it basically contained an ahead-of-its-time input method akin to modern Chinese/Kanji/Hanja on computers, rather than require hunting through 1000+ tiny characters on a grid.

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-uncanny-keyboard/

Cool, I hadn't seen this video. I am currently working on mapping the character tray and boxes of a Taiwanese Jue Shine typewriter, which uses a different mechanism:

https://typewriterdatabase.com/1972-jue-shine-747l.24670.typ...

The benefit of the tray system is that you can easily swap characters, which is essential for Chinese, but maybe less so for Japanese.

I find typing Kanji still a real challenge, I can read and handwrite Kanji to a decent enough level, like middle school, but I find it so slow to type and during that time frame I am second guessing myself if I am correct or not. Romaji or hiragana/katakana are equally as tricky in my view to type.

This page has both the video from above and some additional information: https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2021/04/typewriter-three-lang...

I always wondered how they did that...