本田財団レポート№105「日本語ワードプロセッサの研究開発とその社会的影響」
東芝テック株式会社

森

相談役

健一

Commemorative Lecture on the Occasion of Receiving the Honda Prize
Research and Development of a Japanese Word Processor
and Its Social Consequences”
Ken-ichi Mori
Adviser to the Board of Toshiba Tec Corporation

財団法人

本田財団

森

健一博士

東芝テック株式会社相談役

Dr. Ken-ichi Mori
Adviser to the Board of Toshiba Tec Corporation■略歴1938 年

東京都で生まれる1962 年

東京大学工学部応用物理学科卒業

1962 年

東京芝浦電気株式会社（現株式会社東芝）総合研究所勤務
1962〜87 年

この間 1971 年からカナ漢字変換の研究に入り、初めての日本語ワードプロセッサを開発したグループのチーフをつとめる。

1993 年

同社

情報機器事業本部長

1994 年

同社取締役

パーソナル情報機器事業本部長

1995 年

同社取締役

映像メディア事業本部長

兼記憶情報機器事業本部長
1996 年

同社

1998 年

株式会社テック（現常務取締役
東芝テック株式会社）

専務取締役
1999 年

同社代表取締役社長

2003 年

同社

相談役

■受賞歴
1970 年 東京大学から「手書き文字認識の研究」により工学博士号を授与
1970 年 自由手書き郵便番号自動読取り区分機の研究開発により特許庁長官賞、大河内記念技術賞を受賞
1980 年 日本語ワードプロセッサの研究開発により科学技術庁長官賞を受賞
1991 年 日本語ワードプロセッサの研究開発により特許庁長官賞、大河内記念技術賞を受賞
1992 年 日本語ワードプロセッサの研究開発により日本文化デザイン賞を受賞
1997 年 日本語ワードプロセッサの研究開発により高柳賞記念奨励賞を受賞
2000 年 日本語ワードプロセッサの研究開発とその普及への貢献により電子情報通信学会のフェローに選出■Personal History
1938
Born in Tokyo.
1962
Graduated from the Department of Applied
Physics, the Faculty of Engineering, the Universityof Tokyo.
1962
Joined Tokyo Shibaura Electric Co., Ltd. (present
Toshiba Corporation) and worked for the Research& Development Center.
1962-87 Went into research to enter kanji using Kana-Kanji
conversion in 1971 and served as the chief for thegroup who developed a Japanese word processor for
the first time in Japan.
1993
Group Executive, Information Equipment &Automation Systems Group
1994
Vice President and Group Executive, Information
Equipment Group
1995
Vice President and Group Executive, Video &Electronics Media Group and Storage MediaBusiness Group
1996
Senior Vice President
1998
Executive Vice President, TEC Corporation(present Toshiba TEC Corporation)
1999
President and Chief Executive Officer
2003
Adviser to the Board■Awards
1970 Received a doctor's degree in engineering for“Handwriting Recognition Research” from the
University of Tokyo.
1970 Awarded the Japanese Patent Office Commissioner
Award and Ohkouchi Memorial Technical Award forresearch and development of Handwritten Postal Code
Number Reader and Sorter.
1980 Awarded the Science and Technology Director
General’s Prize for research and development of theJapanese word processor.
1991 Awarded the Japanese Patent Office Commissioner
Award and Ohkouchi Memorial Technical Award forresearch and development of the Japanese word
processor.
1992 Awarded the Japan Cultural Design Award forresearch and development of the Japanese word
processor.
1997 Awarded the Takayanagi Memorial Award for researchand development of the Japanese word processor.
2000 Elected as a fellow of the Institute of Electronics,
Information and Communication Engineers forresearch and development of the Japanese word
processor.

Commemorative Lecture on the Occasion of Receiving the Honda Prize“Research and Development of a Japanese Word Processor
and Its Social Consequences”

I am very honored to be awarded the prestigious Honda Prize. Today, I would like totalk about “the kana-kanji conversion system” for the Japanese input method currently usedin many Japanese information equipment such as personal computers and cell phones, and theresearch and development of a Japanese word processor to which this technology was first
applied. And I will touch on the social consequences of this research and development.
Before taking the main subject, I would like to express my thanks to all those persons who
have led me to the honor of receiving the Honda Prize.
In the first place, I would like to express my profound gratitude to Mr. Hiromori
Kawashima, President of the Honda Foundation, and other staffs of the Honda Foundation forchoosing me as the prize winner for this year. I would like to thank every body of the Honda
Foundation for all their kind considerations they had shown to me. And I would like toexpress my deep gratitude to all the members of the Selection Committee of the Honda Prize.
I would also like to express my sincere thanks to Chairman Nishimuro and othermembers of the management of Toshiba who have supported me during many years for the
research, development and diffusion of the Japanese word processor, to all my colleagues
who have participated in my joys and sorrows taking part in the research and development of
the Japanese word processor at the Research and Development Center and the Ohme Factory,
and to the entire sales personnel who have endeavored in the diffusion of the new product. In
particular, Mr. Tsutomu Kawada, Mr. Shinya Amano and Mr. Kimihito Takeda who formed a
research team with me contributed greatly in the creation of a product concept by defining
what functions a good Japanese typewriter should have in the research and development
program of the Japanese word processor that began in 1971, and by finding a practicalsolution for realizing a “kana-kanji conversion system” which was considered impossible
then. I would also like to express my profound thanks to all the members of the development
team including Mr. Tetsuya Mizoguchi and Mr. Kohji Kodama who buckled down to thedifficult task of merchandizing the Japanese word processor. And I would furthermore like toexpress my sincere thanks to the late Mr. Ken-ichi Sawazaki who was the director of a
research institute when we started the research and development of a Japanese word
processor as an under-the-table research project for his warm support and encouragement toour research team which took six long years in the basic research.
18

And I would also like to express my profound thanks to Professor Yoichiro Murakamiof the International Christian University who kindly recommended me as a candidate for theprestigious Honda Prize and Assistant Professor Kazuchika Ota of Shinshu University who
wrote an enthusiastic letter of recommendation. I am really thankful of the kindness of all the
persons concerned.
And finally I would like to express my deepest thanks to Professor Makoto Nagao,
President of the Kyoto University. Professor Nagao kindly guided us in our study of patternrecognition and of natural language processing. He is our beloved teacher who directly
guided Messrs. Tsutomu Kawada and Shin-ya Amano, my colleagues, at the beginning of ourresearch and development of the Japanese word processor at the Kyoto University.
Twenty-five years have already passed since September 1978 when the first Japaneseword processor JW-10 was launched on the market by Toshiba and put to practical use inJapan. Now the Japanese word processor as a specialized equipment ended its role, but theJapanese input process according to “the kana kanji*1 conversion system” developed thereby
is now widely used in PCs, cell phones, PDAs, computer terminals, work stations, etc. and isused by many people. The realization of a good Japanese typewriter had long been strongly
sought in the Japanese society since the Meiji era. However, in view of the fact that morethan 3,000 characters are necessary for the types of kanji, hiragana and katakana*2 charactersand the Roman numerals and codes used daily and that there are a very large number ofhomonyms in kanji words, it had been considered impossible to realize a “kana kanji
conversion system” and consequently a simple and easy-to-operate Japanese typewriter that
any Japanese people can use and similar to a European language typewriter.

________________________________________________________________*1

Kana is the Japanese syllabary (alphabet) and kanji is the Chinese characters imported from China
sometime in the Sixth Century A.D. and adapted into the Japanese language. Many kanjis are similar
to the Chinese characters presently used in the Mainland China and Taiwan while some arecompletely different.

*2

Hiragana is the cursive kana letter and hiragana is the square form of kana letter used to describe
foreign or imported words.

19

And now I will explain in what circumstance we undertook our research anddevelopment of a Japanese word processor. At first, our research group worked on the subjectof “study on the pattern recognition.” As we entered into an era of co-existence between
humans and machines, we thought that we should study and develop a technology that enablemachines to understand the information transmitted by letters and voices used by us humans
to communicate between themselves and to record as they are. Electronic computers of thosedays depended on the conversion of data recorded on slips and programs into digital
information recorded on punch cards and magnetic tapes by the work of operators. Humans
converted information for the sake of machines. For this reason, we thought that we should
create a machine useful for us humans by developing a machine that can read documents
written by the hand or that understands the words spoken by humans and we established a
Pattern Recognition Research Group. The first research result of the Group was thedevelopment of a technology for reading hand-written numerals. We developed the first
automatic reader/sorter of hand-written postal codes in the world by applying this technology.
This machine is still used at present by the Japanese postal offices for automatically sorting
freely hand-written postal codes.

FIG. 1.

Automatic reader / sorter of freely handwritten postal codes.

Then, we could further advance our researches on the pattern recognition and increase
the types of recognizable characters to more than 3,000 hand-written kanji or Chinesecharacters. However, even if a machine can read hand-written or printed characters one byone, the machine cannot process sentences for humans by understanding the contents oforders given by men or those of documents if it cannot understand the meaning of the wholesentence composed by such characters. After the research on pattern recognition, it wasnecessary to conduct researches on the comprehension of sentences.
20

One of research subjects for the research on the comprehension of sentences is“machine translation.” When an attempt is made to have a machine translate automaticallyJapanese texts into English, any direct translation made by a machine without correctly
understanding the meaning of the original text can be a completely absurd erroneoustranslation. In order to realize a machine translation, it is necessary to pass through three
processes; to analyze the construction and meaning of the original text, to convert theconstruction of the original text to that of the target language by using grammaticalknowledge and to form a semantically correct sentence of the target language. When we wereabout to start the research, we faced the fact that there was no reasonably affordable Japanese
typewriter for inputting Japanese texts while we could use a teletypewriter for inputting
English texts. Upon investigation, we found that the realization of a good Japanese typewriter
was an unsolved important task although it had long been a subject of research in Japan. And
we realized that the analysis of the construction of Japanese kana (Japanese alphabet) text
and its conversion into a text consisting of a mixture of kana and kanji by using grammaticalknowledge may constitute a part of a research on machine translation. Thereupon, we decided
to make a detour and to conduct researches on “the kana-kanji conversion system” before
undertaking researches on machine translation.

Conversion of the sentence structure

Conversion of the sentence
structure

Analysis of theJapanese text
Formation of aJapanese text

Japanese
FIG. 2.

Formation of an
English text

Analysis of the
English text

Japanese word
processor

Process of machine translation

21

EnglishJapanese kana texts written by a kana typewriter are difficult to read to anyone
unaccustomed to it and the Japanese typewriters are slow in writing. These facts constituted
problems. Accordingly, in offices most documents were written by hand, and only official
documents, contracts and other specific documents were normally written out fair by aJapanese typewriter. As the first step of the research and development of the Japanese word
processor, an inquiry was undertaken to find out what functions were desired for a goodJapanese typewriter. With the cooperation of many people in government offices, press andother offices, a large number of potential desires of the future customers were collected. It
was necessary to determine what is the most important and what is the essential among many
desires. We thought that, unlike Japanese typewriters used only by specially trained persons,it must be a product that any speaker of Japanese whether adult, elderly, child or anybody canuse at offices, schools and families. As a result of repeated discussions, we concluded that thefollowing three points were the most important functions that should be studied anddeveloped. These points are rearranged in an order that we foresaw as the future market
would require its realization. I think that it is most important for the future Japan to foresee
the future market, to create the concept of new products that the market requires, to doresearches and develop an unexplored and innovative technology and to cultivate a new
business.
① The device should be able to write Japanese documents faster than writing out fair byhand.
② The device should be portable and should be easy to carry to anywhere.
③ The prepared document files should be freely accessible and transmittable fromanywhere via telephone circuits.
In around 1971 when we started researches on “kana-kanji conversion system,” various
colleges and private businesses were doing researches on various new input systems of theJapanese language. However, no decisively good system was yet developed. As it waspossible to express Japanese sentences by using only kana letters, if a “kana-kanji conversion
system” could be realized for converting appropriate portions into kanji, it would be an
important system that fills the requirement of Item ① above. Professor Kurihara of Kyushu
University and NHK Technology Research Institute were conducting pioneering researches
in this respect.

22However, the problem lay in the processing of homonyms. Homonyms were a peculiar
characteristic of the Japanese language. However, as no good processing method ofhomonyms was available then, there was no other choice than displaying all the candidate
words and having the user choose one of them. This method required the user choose a
specific word from a number of candidate words every time a homonym appeared. Therefore,
the whole process was time-consuming and very unfriendly to the user. And as for the
method of referring the inputted sentence to the dictionary of words, a method called “thelongest match method” was used. This was a method in which only the longest matching
string of characters was preferably chosen from among a number of possibilities foranalyzing kana sentences. For example, a string of characters “ひとは(hitowa)” contains
possibilities of “人は(Man used in the subjective case),” “日とは(as for day or the sun),” “火とは(as for fire). However, according to the longest match method, “人は(Man used in thesubjective case)” is always chosen as the first candidate word. Because of such a problem, thehit rate of choosing correct a homonym remained in the range of 75-80 percent. This cannot
be said to have attained the level of practical use.

To tell the conclusion obtained from the result of our researches, the key to realize apractical level “kana kanji conversion system” lay in making the Japanese grammar more
precise and the development of a function in which a machine itself learns automatically the
information on the frequency of use of homonyms by users.

The Japanese grammar taught at the Japanese middle schools divides nouns into
ordinary nouns and proper nouns. A finer classification of nouns to enable efficient
processing of homonyms is an example of making the Japanese grammar precise. For
example, the noun corresponding to the portion of “koushou「こうしょう」” of a kanaexpression “koushousuru 「こうしょうする」” may be 交渉(negotiation), 考証(historicalinvestigation), 厚 相 (minister of public welfare), 高 承 (your esteemed approval), 高 尚(highbrow or elegance), 好 尚 (taste), 公 証 (public notary), 哄 笑 (loud laughter), 公 称(nominal, public), 校章(school badge), 鉱床(mineral deposit or ore deposit), 公傷(injury
sustained while on duty), 工匠(artisan), 高唱(advocacy) etc. and may represent many otherhomonyms. However, when the words that can be converted into verbs by adding “suru「する」” at the end of “koushou「こうしょう」” are classified, the candidate words can be
reduced to 交渉(negotiation), 考証(historical investigation), 高尚(highbrow or elegance),
公証(public notary), 哄笑(loud laughter), 公称(nominal, public), 高唱(advocacy) etc.
23

Thereupon, we have decided to call the nouns to which sa line (line of sa, shi, su, se, so)*3
declension verbs “suru 「する」”can be added as “sa line declension nouns” to refine theclassification of nouns. Such a higher precision in the Japanese grammar contributed to
improving the hit rate of correct kana-kanji conversion.

The function of learning the frequency of use of words, on the other hand, is based on
the fact that individual users of a Japanese word processor do not use all the homonyms by
the same frequency of use and that they have individual habits. Among many existinghomonyms contained in a dictionary, users use only a limited number of them for theirwriting. Therefore, an arrangement whereby a Japanese word processor (machine) itself
automatically calculate the frequency of the use of homonyms by the user and display themost frequently used word followed successively by less frequently used words brings about
the effect of improving the hit rate of finding a correct homonym as the user advances in theuse of the Japanese word processor (long-term learning function). Moreover, there is a factthat specific homonyms may be used repeatedly among the homonyms that appeared in asame document. Therefore, an arrangement whereby the machine store the word chosen
finally among the homonyms that appeared while a document is made and the word used
finally is preferably displayed when the same homonym is inputted improves further the hit
rate of words that the user wishes to input (short-term learning function). By combining
grammar processing, “long-term learning function” and “short-term learning function,” wesucceeded in improving the correct hit-rate of kana kanji conversion to 93% or more, andthus we overcame a major technical hurdle towards the completion of a practical Japaneseword processor.

In addition, although we could not adopt it because of a very limited memory capacityof the first Japanese word processor JW-10, it is possible to further improve the processing of
homonyms by using a dictionary of co-occurrence relations between words. This is a methodof utilizing the fact that there is a strong semantic relationship between words that appear in a
sentence.
________________________________________________________________*3

sa line: The “kana” consists of some 51 kana letters composed of only vowels a, i, u, e, and o andcombinations of consonants and said vowesl. These 51 kana letters are disposed in eleven lines
beginning with combinations of different consonants and the first vowel a. The sa line is the third ofsuch eleven lines of kana.

24

Scenery
ScenicbeautyInn

Author

景観 Pleasure trip旅館

著者

Travel

遊覧

景勝

旅行

Place of interest

Magazine【 kankou 】
Completion

建設

Execution

大工

施工

作業
Work

FIG. 3.

土木
Civil engineering

記事

初版
Film

ﾌｨﾙﾑ

感光

【 kankou 】

現像
架橋

ArticleFirst edition

かんこう Exposure to light【 kankou 】

夕刊

新聞

刊行

完工

CarpenterNews paper【 kankou 】【 kankou 】

Evening paper

出版

Publication

観光
Construction

Book

書籍

雑誌

Site seeing

名所

Publication

Development

Bridging

ﾚﾝﾄｹﾞﾝ

写真

X-raysPhoto

影撮
Picture taking

光
Light

太陽
Sun

Dictionary of co-occurrence relations between words.

For example, homonyms corresponding to a kana expression “kankou「かんこう」” include
敢 行 (resolute action), 慣 行 (habitual or customary practice), 観 光 (sight-seeing), 刊 行(publication), 完工(completion), 感光(exposure to light) 官公(government and municipal
offices), 勘考(taking in consideration) etc. However, if there are words such as travel, placeof interest and excursion in the same sentence, the probability of hitting a right homonym will
be higher when the word 観 光 (sight-seeing) is chosen from the list of homonyms
corresponding to “kankou「かんこう」”. This relationship is called “a relationship ofco-occurrence between words (Fig. 3). For a dictionary of 100,000 words, a dictionary ofco-occurrence relations between words would contain a million pairs of words. It takes muchtime to develop a dictionary of co-occurrence relations, but it will be quite effective inprocessing homonyms. This method is adopted in a personal-type Japanese word processor
RUPO in which the memory capacity could be increased. By making the Japanese grammar
precise and taking advantage of the technology of a dictionary of co-occurrence relations, we
could improve the hit rate of correct homonyms to 98% or more.
In order to realize a Japanese word processor as a devoted specialized machine, it is notenough to simply overcome the hurdle of a language processing software called “kana-kanji
conversion system.” Japanese language dictionaries available on the Japanese market containbasic words or difficult words. But they do not contain words frequently used in businessdocuments or letters (such as 貴社[you in addressing to a company], 検収[acceptance of
products on inspection], 帳票[slips and vouchers], 謹復[cordial reply], 酷寒の候[thecoldest season as used in the opening greeting of letters], お慶び[pleasure], and the like),25

proper nouns (such as 佐藤[Sato], 木村[Kimura], 御茶の水[Ochanomidzu], 富士山[Mt.
Fuji], 利根川[River Tone], etc.), derivative words (such as 不純物[impurities], 高精度[high precision], 同左[ditto], 次世代[next generation], etc.) and abbreviations.
These words will naturally be necessary when you imagine the scenery of using a Japaneseword processor. Therefore, we spent time to collect words not contained in Japanese
language dictionaries from high school text books, various standard guide books for businessdocuments, the glossary of the House of Representatives, the glossary of the press, and thelike to develop a dictionary of words for the Japanese word processor.
Hardware technology necessary for the realization of a Japanese word processor wasneither developed then.

KANJI PRINTER

KANJI DISPLAY

Can print kanji patterns of 24 dotseachCharacters displayed are large

Prints at a high speed of 35
characters per secondand easy to readCan display up to 40 characters(1,000 dots) per line

FIG. 4.

Can copy at a same time many
documents

Development of kanji display devices and kanji printers

A display device is necessary to display the Japanese text inputted. But the Braun tubes for
TV of those days had only a resolution of 600 – 700 lines. A line contains 40 characters when
10 point characters are written horizontally on an A-4 format. To display 40 characters in aline on the Braun tube, a resolution of 1,000 lines is necessary. Thus, with the cooperation ofengineers of our Braun tube factory, we newly developed a high-resolution Braun tube. The
situation relating to a kanji printer was similar. At that time, there was a very expensive kanjiline printer for computers. But it was too expensive for use in offices. Accordingly, wedeveloped a small 24-dot wire dot-matrix impact kanji printer. To express correctly kanji
composed of many strokes such as 鬱、覧、鸞、酬、and the like by avoiding any wrong
characters, it is necessary to compose character patterns at least by 24 black and white dots
arranged horizontally and vertically. It took three long years to design 10,000 character
patterns composed of 24 x 24 dots.

26

24 dots

16 dots

FIG. 5. Development of 24 X 24 dot kanji patterns
It took almost six years from founding a Japanese word processor R & D team in 1971
to start the basic research until we had a perspective of being able to realize a practicalproduct in the fall of 1977. With the cooperation of engineers of the Ohme Factory, wedeveloped our product and one year later the first Japanese word processor JW-10 was borne
in Japan.
A Japanese word processor
JW-10 was borne on
September 26, 1978 .
・Takes into consideration thefrequency of use of particular
words

・Usable at offices
・Suitable for the preparation ofcontracts

・Price: ¥6,300,000.- Weight:
220Kg

FIG. 6. The first Japanese word processor
In a press interview announcing the launch of the new product, we explained to thereporters present that Items ① to ③（P.22） were the product concepts of the Japanese word
processor, that we foresaw the development of the market according to this order, and that
therefore the next target for product development for Toshiba was the development of a
portable Japanese word processor. However, sitting in front of JW-10 of the size of an officetable (weighing 220 Kg and priced at ¥6.3 million), nobody could believe our explanationthat in the future it will be a portable product priced around ¥100,000. And nobody except a27

reporter showed any reaction. It was simply logical because at that time even desktop-type
PCs were not on the market. We thought that the advent of liquid crystal display devices inplace of Braun tubes would enable us to realize portable Japanese word processors, and westrongly requested our component factory to develop a liquid crystal display device. In five
years since then, a liquid crystal display capable of displaying two lines of 40 characters each
was made on an experimental basis. We quickly obtained this and made on an experimental
basis the prototype of a portable Japanese word processor.

･Rupo JW-R10 was borneon June 26, 1985
・Displays two lines of characters of
24 x 24 dots each.
・Rich printing functions
・Light weight, small size weighing 3.5Kg
・Cheap at ¥99,800
FIG. 7. Prototype of the personal Japanese word processor RUPO
As we could set the price of our personal Japanese word processor RUPO below ¥100,000, it
gained an explosive popularity and proved to be a great hit. I believe that the diffusion ofJapanese word processors among the families and offices throughout Japan owed to thesuccess of the personal Japanese word processor RUPO.
And here I would like to reflect on the history of the Japanese national characters andlanguage problem and the social demand for the Japanese typewriter.
Kanji arrived in Japan around the first century AD from China by passing throughKorea, and gave a great impact on Japan which had no letter civilization then. Nihon Shoki
written in classical Chinese and Manyoshu written in Manyo kana*4 using the phoneticalpronunciation of kanji were edited. During the Heian Period, katakana letters and hiragana
letters were invented and the unique Japanese expression method of using a mixture of kanji
and kana began to be used for recording various things and for creation. The letter civilization
was initially limited to the upper class, but it spread gradually widely and in particular________________________________________________________________*4

Manyo kana is a special type of kana used during the Nara Period (714 – 784 A.D.) and particularly
in Manyo-Shu (Collection of a Myriad Leaves) containing more than four thousand poems.

28during the Edo Period it spread among the masses through the terakoya (private elementary
school) system and others. However, at the end of the Edo Period, Hisoka Maejima who later
became the first Minister of Posts and Telecommunication submitted a written petition
entitled “A Proposal for the Abolition of Kanji” to the Shogun Yoshinobu Tokugawa in 1866
advocating that obliging children to learn many characters was a too great burden for them,that kanji should be abolished to be replaced by kana letters, and that the Japanese grammar
should be improved and Japanese dictionaries should be edited.
During the Meiji Period, many informed people were interested in the problem of theJapanese writing and language and expressed their own opinions. Arinori Mori who became
the first Minister of Education proposed a radical plan that the Japanese language should be
abolished to be replaced by English in order to stand on the equal footing with the Western
powers. But he was reportedly admonished by his foreign friends that the civilization of acountry depend to a large extent on its national language and that the national language
should not be change unscrupulously. After the Meiji Period, the problem of the national
script and the national language was seriously discussed from the point of view that it isnecessary to improve business efficiency in order to catch up with the advanced countries.
With regard to Japanese typewriters, in 1915 Mr. Kyota Sugimoto made a survey on
the frequency of using kanji and developed a Japanese typewriter containing about 2,400
fonts. In 1920, Mr. Yoshitaro Yamashita established Kana Moji Kyokai (Kana Letters
Association). In 1923 he developed a kana typewriter and endeavored to promote a higher
efficiency of business and the diffusion of a kana typewriter.

Kana typewriter

Japanese typewriter(made by Underwood co,.ltd(made by Nihon Shojiki Shokai in 1915)

in 1923)“Grand Museum of the Japanese Language”
by Jun-ichiro Kida

FIG. 8. Development of Japanese typewriters and kana typewriters29

After the end of the World War II, in 1946, the Japanese Ministry of Education published “A
List of Kanjis Designated for Daily Use” in order to restrict the use of kanjis. And theMinistry organized the Council on National Language by designating mainly those who
argued in favor of the adoption of kana letters and romaji*5 in the future to be used forwriting Japanese documents as its members. However, Mr. Seiichi Funabashi and otherminority members who defended the use of kanjis published a statement of secession statingthat they are opposed to the deliberation on a very important issue for the nation such as theissue of national script and the national language behind a closed door in the Council mainlycomposed of members of biased ideas. Therefore, a large number of people paid attention tothis dispute. Mr. Tsuneari Fukuda stated in his work entitled “My National Language
School”: “The use of characters should not be restricted by machines and if any machine isnecessary, it is necessary to invent a new machine depending on the actual condition of thecharacters.” Thus, he expressed his expectation for the invention of a new good Japanese
typewriter.
In 1965 the Chairman of the Council on National Language published a statement that sincethen the mixed writing of kanjis and kana letters would be the standard script of the Japanese
language and thus terminated for a moment the issue of the national script and the national
language that had lasted for about 100 years. As there were opinions that even the national
language should be changed because of the absence of a good Japanese typewriter, I believethat engineers have the obligation of conducting timely researches and development meeting
the requirement of the society.
Now, I would like to touch on the social consequences of the realization of a Japaneseword processor based on “the kana-kanji conversion system.”In the first place, let’s see how the number of word processors and PCs shippedchanged during 20 years from 1980 through 1999.

________________________________________________________________*5

romaji is a method of writing Japanese in Roman characters.

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Unit: 1,000 units
INTER・NET
INTER・NET

12000

Personal
Personal word
word
processor
processor

10000

RUPO
RUPO

ＷＩＮＤＯＷＳ９５
ＷＩＮＤＯＷＳ９５

8000
6000
4000

P/C

2000
0

WORD PROCESSOR

'80

'82

84

'86

'88

'90

'92

'94

'96

'98

FIG. 9. Number of word processors and PCs shipped
As a majority of PC users are using a kana-kanji conversion software, the number of units
including this is considered as the number of kana-kanji conversion software being usedthroughout Japan.
According to this figure, as a Japanese word processor by which Japanese documents can beprepared faster than writing by hand as described in Item ①(P.22) was launched on themarket, the Japanese information processing began to diffuse at first at offices. And aspersonal Japanese word processors described in Item ②(P.22) were launched on the market,
the use of the Japanese information processing spread to families and schools. Finally, theadvent of the Internet of PCs resulted in the realization of Item ③ (P.22) and thegeneralization of the Japanese information process on a full scale. This process was exactly inthe same order as we had foreseen in 1971.
It is necessary to verify whether the realization of a Japanese word processor resulted
in the possibility of preparing documents at a speed similar to that of European language
typewriter as desired by Mr. Tsuneari Fukuda in 1960. The result of a study in which a large
number of articles of English newspapers published in Japan and of articles of Japanesenewspapers of the same contents were collected and the number of characters used therein
was compared is published. This study report revealed that the number of characters used in
English text and Japanese text expressing the same content was in average 2.5 : 1. Anexperienced English typist is reported to type approximately 200 strokes in a minute, whichcorresponds to 80 characters of the Japanese text in a minute. This speed is roughly the sameas the input speed of experienced operators of Japanese word processors. This means that themachine desired by Mr. Tsuneari Fukuda in 1960 has been realized.

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◆Number of letters in a text of the same contents.
European languages text : Japanese text
= 2.5:1.0◆Comparison of the typing speed of experienced
typists (converted to Japanese text)
English text at 200 strokes/min. ⇒ 80 characters/min.
Romaji at 180 strokes/min.
⇒ 75 characters/min.
Kanji telex at 60 characters/min. ⇒ 60 characters/min.
Japanese word processor at 80 characters/min ⇒ 80 characters/min

FIG. 10. Comparison of typing speed of European texts and Japanese texts“The kana-kanji conversion system” is widely used not only in Japanese word
processors but also in PCs, PDA, cell phone and the like, and has become an essentialfunction for the Japanese information processing. It began to be used at various places ofwork including offices, schools and households and by people of various professions or in theworld of creation. However, the greatest joy we felt as research and development engineers
came from the letters of thanks we received from physically handicapped persons who could
not communicate with others without the help of family members because of their shaking
hands and voices in which they wrote that thanks to the appearance of the Japanese word
processor RUPO it has become possible for them to communicate clearly with others, write
letters or create poems. We provided, on the keyboard of a Japanese word processor, a thinsheet metal cover bent in the form of the Japanese katakana letter コ with holes perforated at
positions corresponding to each key of the keyboard. After fixing their attention enough oneach target, they thrust their finger into a hole to press a specific key, but as their finger tip
shakes, they press on the same key a number of times. We modified a little our Japaneseword processor program in such a way that the operation of pressing on a same key a number
times within a limited length of time may be interpreted same as that of pressing once onsuch a key. Such a mechanism enabled physically handicapped persons to type slowly but
correctly sentences they wanted to input without the help of others.

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（Provided by Asahi Shimbun Osaka Social
Welfare Organization ）◆ Office◆ Home◆ School◆ Writer, poet, author◆One’s own personal
history, one’s own
collection of short poems(tanka)◆ Reporter, stenographer◆Physicallyhandicapped person◆ Foreigner

Word processors donated for physicallyhandicapped persons are popular because they
enable to type easily even with toes. At the
Osaka Municipal Sport Center for PhysicallyHandicapped Persons.

FIG. 11. Word processors supporting the Japanese language culture
The realization of the Japanese word processor made an important impact on word
processors of other languages. An English word processor developed more or less at the sametime in the United States as the Japanese word processor had only an error correction
function and an editing function. However, on learning that Japanese word processors
contained a word dictionary, the developer of the English word processor improved theirproduct by including an automatic spell check function based on the use of a dictionary. The
success of word processors in Japan stimulated various organizations in China to study anddevelop various input methods of Chinese, and they totaled more than 500 kinds. However,they could not find a decisively good method. We Japanese owe a great debt to the Chinese
who had taught us the Chinese characters 20 centuries ago. Desirous to repay even a part ofour debt to them, in cooperation with the Dalien Institute of Technology, we made a Chinese
word processor on an experimental basis by applying “the kana-kanji conversion system” of
the Japanese word processor. In Japan, the Japanese primary school children learn kanaletters as the first characters in their first year, and in China the Chinese school children learn
in their first year pinyin corresponding to romaji used in Japan. When a text is inputted bypinyin using “a pinyin Chinese character conversion system” made on an experimental basis,the inputted text is automatically converted into Chinese. It is said that the conversion speed
is the fastest among many Chinese input systems that have been developed.
Inputted text: dalianshizhongguobeifangzuidade
gangkouchengshi
Converted text: 大連是中国北方最大的港口城市

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Immediately after the announcement of the first Japanese word processor, we wereasked whether it may not be possible to develop a voice word processor that converts directly
pronounced voices into documents through “the kana-kanji conversion system” without using
keyboard. Ordinary conversational voices correspond to sosho or a highly cursive style ofwriting kanji and it is difficult to have such voices recognized automatically. Lately however,voice word processors capable of converting quite correctly voices pronounced with somecare corresponding to gyosho or a somewhat cursive style of writing kanji have been placedon the market.
The research and development and commercialization of Japanese word processor
match perfectly with the motto of Honda Motors Co. as proclaimed by Mr. Soichiro Honda:“the joy of buying, the joy of selling and the joy of creating.” If we could contribute even to asmall extent to the human society by making the impossible possible through our engineeringresearches and developments, it is our greatest joy as engineers. With these words, I would
like to close my commemorative lecture. I thank you sincerely for your kind attention. And I
would like to express again my profound thanks to everybody of the Honda Foundation forawarding me such a prestigious Honda Prize.

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