A Century of Letterpress: Inside Tokyo's Sasaki Type Foundry

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In a quiet residential neighborhood of Kagurazaka, Tokyo, once lined with printing houses and publishers, sits the Sasaki Type Foundry. The shop has a history of 108 years. Inside, sample prints are displayed on the counter, and old wooden shelves are packed tightly with rows of type.

Shelves packed with a wide variety of type for sale. In the back workshop, former owner Seiichi Sasaki adjusts a printing press. (©Sankei by Katsuyuki Seki)

Movable type refers to the letter blocks used in letterpress printing. The process involves four main steps: casting type from lead alloy, selecting letters from the type cases, arranging them to form a plate, and finally printing. Today, Sasaki is the only shop in Japan that still carries out all of these steps from start to finish.

President Sasaki checks the type as it comes from the machines. (©Sankei by Katsuyuki Seki)

The shop holds more than seven million pieces of type in about ten varieties. These include Japanese Mincho and Gothic styles, as well as alphabets and symbols. Six automatic type-casting machines, built more than sixty years ago, are still running.

President Sasaki checks the type as it comes from the machines. | Once a typeset has been used, it is stored for several years for possible reprints. (©Sankei by Katsuyuki Seki)

A Century in Kagurazaka

The business was founded in 1917. At its peak, about twenty craftsmen worked here. The shop specialized in casting and selling type before later expanding into printing.

Type coming out of a casting machine, each square block embossed with a character, here showing “英”. | A sample print made from typefaces at Sasaki Type Foundry, showing the crisp edges and clear lines of each character. (©Sankei by Katsuyuki Seki)

The current president, Katsuyuki Sasaki, 50, represents the fourth generation. At 36, he left his career in architecture to take over the family business from his father, Seiichi, now 83. He was driven by the wish “not to let the culture of movable type disappear, and to keep the shop alive.”

Six automatic type-casting machines made over 60 years ago on the second floor of Sasaki Type Foundry. (©Sankei by Katsuyuki Seki)

“Letterpress printing gives even the smallest characters a sharpness and a texture of ink that digital printing can’t reproduce,” Katsuyuki says.

He continues to learn the craft of casting and setting type, one character at a time, from his father. In an age of screens and printers, when the use of movable type has sharply declined, the type assembled by craftsmen still carries a warmth that feels alive.

Author: Katsuyuki Seki, The Sankei Shimbun

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