Inventing Japanese Braille

Blind French educator Louis Braille (1809-1852) features prominently in the modern history of Blind education. He is celebrated for his invention of the Braille reading and writing system for blind people, which uses raised, tactile dots arranged in various permutations in a cell (2×3) of two columns and three rows to encode language and numbers. In his honour, the United Nations declared 4 January to be World Braille Day and inaugurated it in 2019. Braille has been in use around the world since its invention, and it has given blind people (including people with visual impairment) the tools to communicate on paper, in print, and more recently, in digital media. The expanded eight-dot cell (2×4) was developed in computer coding for digital Braille.

The general story of Louis Braille’s achievement can be told a little differently, and also more inclusively, from the perspectives of global history, disability history, and Blind history. Braille was originally devised for an alphabetic writing system. This means that languages like French and English would have been more easily translated into Braille at the time of its invention, compared to languages that are written in different scripts. One of those non-alphabetic languages is Japanese. Braille was introduced to Japan in the Meiji period (1868-1912), an era of monumental changes in Japanese society.

Eager to grow into a modern nation-state and empire, and to consolidate its position alongside the leading global imperial powers, the Meiji regime of Japan pursued projects that upgraded and empowered its economy, military, navy, and other fundamental industries. In education, the traditional Japanese scripts, consisting of kanji characters (adapted, indigenized Chinese characters) and kana syllabaries (hiragana and katakana), came into focus as well.

Advocates of reform called for the Japanese scripts to have new orthographic standards for efficient reading and writing, even proposing the rejection of kanji characters and favouring the switch to Romanized spellings to improve phonetic representations within the language. On a practical level, one goal of the reform was to raise literacy rates within the population. On a deeper level, and in a symbolic sense for those advocates, the reformed Japanese language, especially its written form, had to reflect and enshrine the ideals of a civilized Japanese society. These concerns of literacy and civilization similarly prompted Japanese educators, who had learned about Braille from reports of Blind education in Western Europe and the USA, to explore a reading and writing system like Braille for Blind education in Japan.

Among the prominent leaders in the history of Blind education in Japan are Konishi Nobuhachi (1854-1938) and Ishikawa Kuraji (1859-1944), two sighted educators who contributed greatly to the early development of Japanese Braille in the 1880s and 1890s. Kunmōain, the school where Konishi and Ishikawa taught, opened its doors to blind and deaf students in 1880, and was renamed in 1887 as the Tokyo School for the Blind and Deaf (in short, the Tokyo School; the school was reorganized into a school for blind students in 1909, and a school for deaf students in 1910).

At the time in Japanese society, Blind education in schools, as well as Deaf education, was fairly new. People with disabilities, in general, had limited opportunities and support. The Tokyo School, which earned its status as a school under the direct authority of the Ministry of Education, was one of the few places in Japan where blind and deaf students with some financial means could receive formal education. In addition to a broad curriculum of academic courses, such as language, history, and mathematics, the school offered vocational training in music, acupuncture, and massage – the traditional professions of blind people. Shortly after Konishi was appointed to the school in 1886, Ishikawa joined the teaching staff there upon Konishi’s recommendation. Ishikawa’s immediate task was to thoroughly understand the principles of Braille and transform Braille into a suitable script for the Japanese language. This was no easy feat for anyone, not least because the phonetic and semantic nature of the Japanese scripts had to be accurately codified in the much more limited template of Braille dots.

Japanese Braille took shape over a few years of trial and error. Ishikawa and his committee aimed to develop a functional Japanese-based Braille template that could be used not only at the Tokyo School but also disseminated nationwide as the new standard script for Blind education. From early on, the committee made the crucial decision of comparing Braille with the Japanese kana syllabaries, which are phonetic characters and can be used in writing to represent the sounds of a vast number of kanji characters. In the ensuing discussions, the committee considered at least four proposals of Japanese Braille. Ishikawa’s proposal was one of them. In his proposal, he arranged the dots for the basic vowels, a-i-u-e-o (dot 1: a or あ; dots 1 and 2: i or い; dots 1 and 4: u or う; dots 1, 2, and 4: e or え; and, dots 2 and 4: o or お), and kept the respective vowel placements in creating consonantal syllabic blocks.

Ishikawa matched the script with the kana syllabaries, while ensuring that the configurations of dots were distinct enough from one another to be legible from a tactile perspective. Blind students were invited to participate in the committee meetings and test the various scripts as described by the proposals. At the final meeting in 1890, after the evaluations, the committee selected Ishikawa’s script, which formed the foundation of today’s Japanese Braille. Numbers, it was decided, were to be written using the original Braille notations to maintain consistency with global conventions. The expanded script with palatalized and labialized phonetic combinations was approved in 1898 and disseminated the following year.

Literacy in Japanese Braille got a boost at a time when commercial printing technology supported the circulation of knowledge. As more schools outside of Tokyo taught Japanese Braille in the next decades, and as literacy and proficiency in the script increased, the demand for reliable news and information grew within the blind population. To meet this demand, the first Braille newspaper, Tenji Mainichi (Braille Mainichi), was founded in Osaka in 1922. It became the flagship newspaper for the nation’s blind population and continues to be published to this day. The founding newspaper editors gave educated blind people access to information on all areas of life and provided a platform for blind people to share in a sense of connection with one another and with the general reading public in Japanese society. Whilst the newspaper’s publication fuelled a new print and information revolution in Blind history, it perhaps also opened a social divide between those who had and those who had not had the opportunity to learn Braille.

There are many ways, of course, to read the success of the Japanese Braille newspaper and the development of Blind education in Japan. The inventors of Japanese Braille introduced a whole new world of learning and communication to the blind population, who in turn, and over time, grew to empower themselves by commanding the script as a tool to write their roles into the social life of the nation. The story that often gets told is the story of Braille in Europe and North America – home to many cultures that use the Latin or Roman alphabet – but not the more complex stories of how cultures of different scripts found, used, and adapted Braille for their languages. This story of Braille in Japan, as well as other overlooked stories of Braille reminds us how and why Braille became a cultural script in the global context of Blind identity formation.

Notes on language

‘Braille’ and ‘Blind’ are spelled with ‘B’ in the upper case to emphasise the cultural history and education of blind people (e.g., Blind history, Blind education, School for the Blind). Same as ‘Deaf’ with ‘D’ in the upper case (for Deaf history, Deaf education, School for the Deaf). In instances in which ‘blind’ refers to the condition of being blind or having visual impairment (e.g., blind people), ‘blind’ is spelled with ‘b’ in the lower case. Same as ‘deaf’ with ‘d’ in the lower case in references to the condition of being deaf or having hearing impairment.

The article generally uses disability-first language (e.g., ‘blind people’, the word ‘blind’ preceding the word ‘people’, to refer to people who are blind or have visual impairment) to keep the focus on the experience of disability.

Japanese names are listed using the convention of the family name followed by the personal/given name.

Further reading

Kaneko, Akira, et al. Shiryō ni miru tenji hyōkihō no hensen: Keiō kara Heisei made: Nihon Tenji Iinkai sōritsu 40 shūnen kinen jigyō. Tokyo: Nihon Tenji Iinkai, 2007. (Japanese)

‘Japanese Letters’ NHK World Japan (in the ‘Easy Japanese Conversation Lessons’ section)

‘Brief History’ Special Needs Education School for the Deaf, University of Tsukuba (Japan)

‘School Outline’ Special Needs Education School for the Visually Impaired, University of Tsukuba (Japan)