With several thousand characters to contend with, how were the Japanese able to use typewriters before the advent of digital technology?
The answer is the kanji typewriter, which was invented by Kyota Sugimoto in 1915. This invention was deemed so important that it was selected as one of the ten greatest Japanese inventions by the Japanese Patent Office during their 100th anniversary celebrations in 1985.
The kanji typewriter used separate metal pieces as strikers, somewhat like movable type. They were arranged in a grid in the tray beneath the typewriter:
One of the things that made the typewriter difficult to use was getting the strike lever force correct. If struck with even just regular force, characters such as decimal points or punctuation would pierce the ribbon and paper, becoming stuck in the rubber platen. On the other hand, very complex characters required striking with additional force to compensate for the large surface area of the typeface. This combined with the huge number of characters (which makes hunt and peck typing on a QWERTY keyboard seem trivial) meant that only experienced operators could use these typewriters.