Tourist Map for Letterpress fan in Osaka Japan

Thank you for posting this. It is very interesting.

I visited the Historical Village of Hokkaido in Sapporo earlier this year, and that village has a letterpress print shop. I believe they said that Japanese has 50,000 characters, and in that print shop there were rows upon rows of metal type characters.

If anyone ever gets a chance to visit Japan, don’t pass it up. It is a wonderful, beautiful place!

Can definitely agree with that Geoffrey. An amazing country to visit.

I will try my best to extend my trip over to Osaka next time I visit - thank you for the link nanikatsu-san.

I have never managed to venture far outside of Tokyo, but can also recommend the Tokyo Print Museum, in the Toppan Print Company building. They have loads of interesting items there including a replica Gutenberg Press, a page from the 42-line bible and a working print room full of Japanese and western type. (amongst many other things). It was cheap to enter and I was pretty much the only person in there - had it all to myself. Bliss. I wrote a little blog post on it a few months ago if anyone’s interested… http://www.letterpresser.co.uk/tokyo-printing-museum/

Rich

Geoffrey

Yes, there are many Japanese characters, “KANJI (漢字)”.
To be sure, Japanese dictionaly, “The Daikanwa Jiten”, contains about 50,000 characters.
But many letterpress printing shop usualy had about 5,000 characters even when during the heyday of letterpress.

When they needed a character which didn’t have, would order to type foundry.
Sometimes they did cut and paste two characters and made new one.

Yuichiro Onishi
Nanikatsu
Osaka, Japan

richsmall

I have been to the Tokyo Print Museum.
It’s nice place for not only printer, artist and designer but also children and student, I think.
I also recommend the Paper Museum when next visiting Tokyo.
http://www.papermuseum.jp/en/

Yuichiro Onishi
Nanikatsu
Osaka, Japan