I saw that Toshiba recently won a special award for its JW-10 Word Processor, a breakthrough product that allowed the Japanese language to join the modern age of computing when it debuted in 1978. The idea for a Japanese word processor came six years earlier, when Toshiba engineer Kenichi Mori talked with newspaper editors who complained that their writers took much longer to write articles than their counterparts in the U.S., and he realized that a computer-based workflow was needed in Japan. Since Japanese has thousands of kanji characters, creating a way for users to easily select the kanji they wanted to enter was needed, and they came up with the modern system in which the user enters hiragana characters then hits a button to cycle through possible characters for that word, with software that helps guess the correct character so there aren’t a lot of embarrassing errors in the document. The JW-10 cost $63,000 and weighed 220 kg, but it proved that there was no fundamental reason why Japanese users couldn’t embrace this new technology along with the rest of the world. This fundamental kanji input system is everywhere now, and any time a person enters Japanese on a Mac or PC or using a keitai (cell phone), they’re using the fundamental algorithms developed by the Toshiba engineers. Unfortunately, creating the first word processor in Japanese had the unintended consequence of making just about every adult-aged Japanese person terrible at writing kanji, thanks to the computer interface that looks up the characters for you. In this age of convenient electronic devices, the average Junior High School student can probably write a lot more kanji than most adults.
