Japanese Braille

Abstract

Braille is perhaps the only area of Japanese linguistic life in which serious attention was paid to the problem of word and phrase delimiters before the advent of computers. Japanese orthography does not use spaces in the Western manner, but braille texts must if they are to be intelligible. The first part of this paper describes the fundamentals of Japanese braille—in which cells correspond to letters of the alphabet, punctuation marks, or special contracted forms—Japanese braille cells are associated with elements of the syllabic script called kana. This leaves no room for contractions, although it does result in some savings in space. Are these savings superior to what could be achieved in a roman-based Japanese braille system? The second part of this paper answers that question in the negative.