In a Japanese Composing-Room.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXIII, Issue 2, 12 January 1905, Page 6

In a Japanese Composing- Room.

Here is an interesting description of the composingroom of a Japanese newspaper. A New Zealand compositor should ttiank his stars that his lines have fallen In pleasaint places. *or, see what »hls brothers in craft in the Land of the Rising Sun have to put up wfth. The Japanese, like the Chinese, employ a written language— a kind of literary dialect— that is considerably removed from the colloquial. They do not, as we do, write as they speak. This necessitates the papers being printed to an extent in two languages— the 'Kana 1 and the square characters, one acting as a key to the other. The square characters are modelled on the Chinese ideographs, a terrible jumble of geometrical figures, crosses, and zigzags, the whole effect presenting the appearance of the trail of innumerable inky footprints of drunken flies. Of these ideographs, at least 4000 to 5000 are in everyday use. So that the compositor must needs be a scholarly man tjo recognise these characters at sight, the strain on the eyes being terrible. In order to facilitate the type-setter's task as much as possible, the com-posing-raom is arranged in the following manner :—: — Ihe compositor is seated at a little table, on which are spread forty-seven ' Kana ' characters. On receiving his copy he cuts it imto small strips, and hands eacn strip to a boy. The latter marches along the room with this strip until finally he has been able to collect from a number of cases frhe different ideographs. Half-a-dozen boys are ttfnis running hither and thither searching for ideographs, all the time keeping up a dirge-like chants in which they sing .the name of tihe character they want, as in order to recognise it he has to hear its sound first, no Japanese of the lower classes being even able to read a paper or book unless he reads it aloud. The writer of this article recalls to mind his first night's engagement on a newspaper in Toklo. Hearing a continual babel of voices and sounds of melancholy attempts at vocalisation rising upward from the room below his, >he, at a loss to account for the queer noises, aslked the Japanese mamager whether he conducted a singing-class for his compositors. He was at once informed that such was the indispensable accompaniment to a Japanese compositor's work. When the boys have collected all their ideographs trtiey place them before the compositor, who then has to have recourse to a pair of goggles in order to decipher the characters, fish out the corresponding types in the 1 Kana ' character, and, finally, set up the wtfiole in proof. These proofs, again, are sung out aloud by one proof-reader to another, adoTng more noise to the bustle and confusion of weird sounds already reigning in the room.