Typewriter Collector’s entire YouTube channel is worth browsing, as it’s filled with lovingly restored and often strange typewriters. This particular one is Toshibia BW-1182 from the 1940s. The horizontal cylinder contains Chinese, Japanese, and English characters. YouTube commenter amontoval describes the arrangement:
Listen beautiful relax classics on our Youtube channel.
They’re arranged phonetically by most common “on-yomi” (or kun-yomi in some cases) according to the kana syllabary (many homophones, of course). Can’t see the whole circumference of the cylinder but at about 0:30 it’s clear that the order doubles back at the ring of mathematical symbols. Red characters help parse the readings. Last character to left of equal sign can be pronounced “kin” (exert) and the first character in next row “gin” (silver), then “ku” (suffer) in red followed by “kuu” (sky, empty), “kuma” (bear), “kun” (teachings, meaning [also the kun in kun-yomi]), “gun” (group), then “kei” (system) in red followed many, homophones of “kei”. It’s the same order in which (mostly compounded character) words in a normal Japanese monolingual dictionary for Japanese speakers would appear.
-via Nag on the Lake
Source: neatorama