Hiragino, drawn by a tiny Tokyo studio
The Japanese font on your iPhone has been drawn since 1989 by a studio of three people.
字游工房 Jiyukobo was founded in September 1989 by three designers who had left Sha-Ken, one of the large Japanese type manufacturers: Torinoumi Osamu (born 1955), Suzuki Tsutomu, and Katada Keiichi. In 1990 they signed with Dainippon Screen for what became the Hiragino series.
Torinoumi drew the kana for Hiragino Mincho — the part of a Japanese typeface where the personality is. Kanji can be copied or derived; kana are drawn, and the kana are what you feel. The result has been the iPhone’s Japanese system font since 2007. The story passed around inside Apple at the time was that Steve Jobs’s reaction was monosyllabic: “Cool!”
「日本人にとって文字は水であり、米である」 “For the Japanese, type is water and rice.” — Torinoumi Osamu, often citing his teacher Kozuka Masahiko
The studio collected recognition slowly. The 2002 Sato Keinosuke Prize. The 2024 Yoshikawa Eiji Cultural Prize — one of Japan’s significant cultural honours. In 2019, Jiyukobo became a subsidiary of Morisawa, and Torinoumi stepped down as president, staying on as a designer.
The arithmetic of scale is worth sitting with. Three people founded the studio. For most of its life it has employed a handful of designers. Hiragino now ships on every iPhone sold, every Mac made, in every iOS keyboard in Japan — which puts it in daily contact with over a hundred million people. That is not an industrial outcome. It is the work of a small workshop that happens to be on the global hot path.
For a type designer, the practical lesson is mundane and important: Japanese type is not one thing. A Japanese typeface is kanji — tens of thousands of them — plus hiragana plus katakana plus Latin plus punctuation, each subsystem with its own optical standards, and all of them needing to sit together without fighting. The Hiragino series handles that. Jiyukobo draws it.