From Wikipedia (Toshiba) we learn that Toshiba had its roots in the business of communication; they were the first Japanese manufacturer of telegraph equipment when founded as Tanaka Seisakusho in 1875. The company was renamed Shibaura Seisakusho in 1904, and merged with Tokyo Denki in 1939 to form Tokyo Shibaura Denki, nicknamed Toshiba. It wasn't until 1978 that the company was officially renamed the Toshiba Corporation. Even as difficult as it would have been to type with such a complicated matrix, it's not surprising that such a company launched a typewriter that contained kanji given the many Japanese firsts the company launched, including the TAC digital computer in 1954, a Japanese word processor in 1978, a laptop personal computer in 1986, and the Libretto sub-notebook personal computer in 1996.