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Recently I had cause to spend a week in the Tokyo area for
work. One afternoon, I had some free time which I spent trying
to track down some japanese type. Last year, I took a year of
Japanese in night school through Harvard Extension, and have
had some chance to practice it at work. With my new interest
in letterpress, I thought it would be cool to have some
katakana and hiragana type for my Pilot. Kanji are great, but
on one hand I don't actually know that many and on the other
hand it seems like an expensive and slippery slope to get on
when it comes to aquiring type. So with two hands against
kanji I decided to stick to the phonetics.
The company I work for, E Ink, has a partnership with Toppan
Printing of Japan, so I thought Toppan would be a good place
to start my search. I had never been to the printing museum,
but I read on their website that they had a printing workshop
where you could see and participate in letterpress
printing.
Toppan building near Iidabashi station
The Printing Museum is in here
Inside - before they told me not to take pictures
I popped inside and went straight to the printing workshop. It
looks really cool, and they have many beautiful machines in
there which presumably can be used at some time. Unfortunately
printing workshop participation time is only from 3pm - 3:45pm
and I had arrived at 4 so I was out of luck there. They had a
Pearl, some nice handpresses, and like 20 Adanas which I
assume are for use by guests. Anyway, I talked to the old guy
in an apron in the print shop and after going back and forth
for a while with my baby level japanese he went in the back
and got me a flyer from a print shop. In conversation I also
learned that the term for type in japanese is "katsuji". The
following is from a Japanese-English web dictionary:
The first character means 'raw' or 'fresh', and I have also
seen it in sushi restaurants. One meaning of the second kanji
is 'character'. So the combo could read 'raw characters'.
I took the flyer upstairs and talked to the receptionist to
get directions. She pulled out her map and jotted down a
mini-map for me to get in the general neighborhood. Directions
in Japan are complicated by the fact that adresses are not in
order on the street, but rather by age of construction within
a general vicinity. This shop was near Waseda station on the
Tozai subway line. I walked around for a while asking people
in the area without much luck, and finally just got in a taxi
and had him call the shop for better directions. The place was
in a tiny alley with no sign, but I got there.
Inside was a huge amount of type in tilted trays. One really
nice thing about chinese/japanese characters is that they are
monospaced and square, which makes line justification wicked
easy.
At Sasaki Katsuji-ya
A few trays of sweet katsuji
A nice old guy name Tsukada-san helped me out. He had an
ancient booklet with the full fonts, and a nice poster with
samples of the several fonts available for japanese
characters. The poster was letterpressed itself, and very well
done on glossy paper. I asked him for some extras for friends!
Tsukada-san helping me select a font
I picked out a nice printed style face, and got full
katakana/hiragana plus kanji numbers x 2 of each character in
10 pt and 4 pt. The 4 pt just because it is cool that it is so
small. Altogether this cost about $200. Not cheap! But not
crazy either I suppose. Besides it was a great adventure. I
felt kind of bad making Tsukada-san pick 4 pt type for me for
like an hour...
Packing up my 4 pt type - not a good job if you need bifocals!
The 4 pt tray
The booklet we used to look at available fonts
Close up of back of booklet - 1957!!
We chatted a bit while he was selecting my type. I asked him
if many people came in to buy type now, and he said no, most
people just do it on the computer. When I was there though,
some people came and dropped off some artwork for printing so
I guess they get by as a print shop. We were having a good
time hanging out, so after I got my type Tsukada-san invited
me to check out their typecasting machines. I didn't realize
they actually cast the type there, so I was psyched to check
it out.
Typecasting Machine, second floor
Not sure what kind of machines these are, but they had like 15
of them crammed into a tiny 2nd floor workshop. I have no idea
how they got them up there. They used smallish ingots.
Their oldest typcaster
Not sure what this is
Storage for the brass matrices
Tsukada-san checking out the machines
I asked him if these were monotype machines and he said no,
but that they had a monotype setup on the first floor. We then
went to have a tour of that.
Monotype caster - first floor
The tape generator for the monotype
Monotype caster - front view
Monotype caster - side view
Proof press in the Monotype room
So that was it, and with a domo arigatou gozaimashita I was
off back to my hotel with my bag considerably heavier with
lead type. For future reference, you can get to this place by
going to Waseda station on the Tozai subway line and exiting
to Waseda-dori. Take a left on Waseda-dori and walk maybe
0.5km. The "Mansion-Gallery" store seen below is on the right
side of the street at an intersection:
Shop across the main street from the alley
Stay on the left side of the street and take a left into the
next alley, then left in the next sub-alley. Walk almost
to the outlet of the sub-alley to the next street and the
shop is on the left, maybe one or two doors back from the
street.
On the way back to the subway I stopped in a 100 yen (~$1)
comic book shop packed with people. I sure with I could read Japanese!
100 yen comic book shop
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