How Japanese-equivalent QWERTY was invented

The time was ripe for a Japanese typewriter, but the daunting structure of the written language, with its multiple scripts and thousands of characters, stymied early attempts to develop one. Into the breach stepped inventor Sugimoto Kyota (1882-1972), often hailed as the Edison of Japan. Sugimoto began by studying the relative frequency of individual kanji, eventually arriving at a minimum set of some 2,400 characters (unabridged Japanese character dictionaries list as many as 50,000).