Graham Healey

Graham Healey joined the Centre for Japanese Studies as a postgraduate in 1966 (the same year in which the first three undergraduate students were admitted).

The following year he joined the staff as Assistant Lecturer, and undertook basic Japanese language teaching.

At that time almost no textbooks for English-speaking students of Japanese had been published since before the Pacific War. In 1969, Graham Healey began the process of producing class handouts in Japanese script for his students.

The popularity of these handouts soon led to requests from teachers at other institutions, and in 1974, the University’s Centre for Japanese Studies published the handouts in a four-volume set. Healey describes the laborious process of producing the handouts:

This, of course, was long before the days of the computer and the photocopier, and the production of the materials was a very cumbersome process. The text had to be typed onto stencils, which were used to run off the pages on a Gestetner printer, which could be a very messy process.

Since Japanese and English text could not be typed on the same machine, the English was typed onto the stencil first, leaving spaces for the Japanese. I then typed in the Japanese, using an old-fashioned mechanical typewriter. This was in effect a small printing press about 80 cm square and containing about 3500-4000 individual pieces of type.

The process involved finding the piece of type needed by moving the platen from place to place across the whole bed of type, so that a really skilled operator would only achieve about ten or fifteen words a minute. My speed was rather less.

Graham Healey

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