Japanese typewriter

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.

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.