One of my favorite work tasks is bringing classic Nichiren Shu Japanese texts into the digital age so they can be translated easily or republished using the latest print technologies for paper and ebooks. Before a title goes into production there are essential steps of obtaining the basic text in digital format, if any exists, and exploring archives for definitive published Showa era sources to double check digital text integrity. Exploration is spelunking into the past to find people connected with the original production process, however remotely, and tease out helpful details: are there any production materials, was it all analog, is there any digital content to work with, and so on.
When helping to bring Senchu Murano’s wonderful Lotus Sutra English language translation back to life, I was heart broken to learn that after months of searching, the original production materials had been destroyed when the printer closed the business only a year earlier. Fortunately there was already a team working on recreating all the English text (over 120,000 words with lots of transliterated, diacritical heavy Pali vocabulary) in desktop computer word processing software. However, when the project finally entered into the primary layout stage I quickly discovered that Murano, or the kumihan typesetters of the 1974 1st edition, had used a number of non-standard Kanji characters in the glossary section, aka Gaiji.
Fortunately I knew the designers of the Hiragino Japanese macOS system font and they introduced a former apprentice who did outside contract font design work. After a careful review he found 15 gaiji characters, unique regular kanji variations not included in the Hiragino Gothic Pro N extended character set and created them for Lotus Sutra 3rd edition.
One thing I learned from the gaiji creation process is that the line between a quirky Japanese kanji design of a regular character and a real gaiji can be very fine. It’s not always an easy black or white call. There is also the publishing history to consider, what was the original intention? Did latter editions swap out complex kanji with simplified versions due to the transition from analog production, and because the early electronic layout production systems were so limited? These are all important points to consider when porting classic Japanese texts to modern production system software.
I was reminded of this with a new project recreating a 31 day chant book of Nichiren Shonin’s Minobu Letters. Fortunately Okazawa san was available to do another fine comb review of our materials.
We found that the original Showa text kanji, which is considered the definitive source, had been changed in the Heisei version. Upon further investigation I discovered the Heisei text had been reproduced on a proprietary Panasonic electronic typesetting device that had limited character sets, and was obsolete. The Panasonic device Japanese fonts used i the book were also somewhat quirky. They looked different enough to consider them gaiji-like, but in the end after comparing everything to Showa printed books, we realized they were just quirky simplified designs of the Panasonic device. Not the original intention.
The happy end here is that the default macOS Hiragino Gothic Pro N extended character set has all our production needs covered. And it’s a great design that travels very well.
I highly recommend it.
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