[GreenKeys] japanese teleprinter

[Jim Haynes]

On Tue, 25 Aug 2015, Dave Horsfall wrote:

> I'm bemused over the caption mentioning "Teleprinter for Chinese
> Characters".  On a Japanese TTY?
>
I'm far from expert on this, but I think the written Japanese language
Kanji are called Chinese characters by the Japanese.  They have two
other written systems, hiragana and katakana.  The latter two are
phonetic symbols for syllables.  And then there is roma-ji, which is
Japanese syllables rendered in Roman letters.

Many years ago I copied off the air some RTTY text that was in roma-ji.
I showed it to a student from Japan, and at first he said it didn't
make any sense to him.  Then I told him to read it out loud and as
soon as he did that he recognized it as Japanese.

I assume it was roma-ji that the Japanese used with the Red and Purple
encryption systems made famous by World War II.  Because they describe
the machines as encrypting the consonants and vowels separately.

Presumably they would have used roma-ji so their messages could be
transmitted through Western language radio and cable systems: e.g.
Western Union, RCA, etc.  if they didn't have a direct wireless
connection to Japan.  There are other accounts of WW-II intercept
operators being trained to copy Japanese Morse on special typewriters,
so I guess that was hiragana or katakana.