Today is great day for Japanese typography: Morisawa and Shaken announced they will co-develop the Shaken font library for OpenType (English press release here), due for release in 2024 in celebration of the Japanese typesetter they created 100 years ago. The founders of Morisawa (Nobuo Morisawa) and Shaken (Mokichi Ishii) co-created the first modern Japanese typesetter in 1924 but quickly became 2 different family companies. By the late 1970’s Shaken had grown to be the dominate force of the Japanese pre-press market with the largest and most sought after font library. In the 1980’s it started to unravel.
Shaken never made the transition to digital pre-press and PostScript fonts, which Morisawa did with a very profitable licensing agreement with Adobe. When Shaken announced OpenType fonts at the 2011 International eBook Expo, they were a has-been company run into the ground by sheer greed. They never delivered on that promise. As the former Shaken lead font engineer told me, there was no font engineer talent left in the company to do the job of re-creating the proprietary digital format library into OpenType.
Now that Shaken is finally free of the founder family, since 2018, they are cutting a deal with Morisawa who have the necessary talent and font engineering expertise to bring the Shaken font library into the digital era. They even have Jiyukobo, creators of the Hiragino Japanese system fonts used in macOS and iOS, which Morisawa bought in 2019. An interesting side story: Apple negotiated with Shaken to purchase their library shortly after Steve Jobs returned but it never came to be, Jeff Martin should be proud of today’s announcement.
It’s hard to emphasize how important this development is. Imagine the LinoType library, or everyday standards like Helvetica, New York, etc. were never licensed as digital fonts…until now. I doubt the first release will encompass OpenType Variable Fonts due to cost and time restraints. Morisawa has yet to release anything in that format so far.
The co-developer team will also have to prioritize and edit as the Shaken library is huge and only a small subset ever made it onto proprietary Shaken digital typesetters. There are huge glyph variation and feature holes to fill. Just getting a simplified basic Shaken library in OpenType format will be a tremendous job.
The 2024 delivery date is important in more ways than the 100th anniversary of Japanese typesetting. With Shaken selling off everything they can over the past 2 years, 2024 is when the last Shaken digital typesetters go out of service. Shaken will stop pretending to be a font developer, cut loose their last remaining 100 customers and live on as a real estate holding company. Morisawa is the only listed contact on the co-development announcement, they will eventually buy out the Shaken library.
But that’s a story for another day. Today is a celebration. After nearly 100 years of separation, 2 halves of a whole are coming together again. In Requiem for Shaken I wrote, “When the last person turns out the lights at Shaken KK, I hope they open the vaults and set the Shaken font library free. Only by taking flight and having a life of its own can it ever hope to live on in the hearts and imaginations of future Japanese designers.” Japanese designers finally have their font legacy back.
Reference posts and background links:
Requiem for Shaken
The Hiragino macOS Japanese system font story
The Second Wave of Japanese Desktop Publishing
Apple’s Once and Future Japanese Variable System Font
TrueType GX Model Lives On in OpenType Variable Fonts
History of Shaken and Morisawa Photo Typesetter development (great article by a Japanese desginer written in German!)