Weaning Japanese from the Brush

Mechanical input of Japanese is a subject that has always fascinated me, so I was happy to find this history of wapro (word processors) in English:
http://www.honco.net/japanese/05/
When I first came to this country, one of the first indicators of how hard the Japanese language would be to learn was an old lady at city hall operating an old school Japanese typewriter. The device itself was closer to a printing press than any typewriter I had ever seen… I remember my second cousin pointing her out and saying, “before your very eyes, old technology fades away.”
(He’s a minister. Ministers say some really deep stuff sometimes, it makes me wonder if they know something I don’t.)