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Tenyaku Fureai ehon

Library of Braille Picture Books (Fureai Bunko)

There were a lot of voices in Japan 40 years ago among the people who call for the necessity of making tactile illustrated books for the visually handicapped children.Following such voices, many volunteer groups
have started actitvities to make by hand such tactile illustrated books.As its result、the first book was made by a volunteers group based in Hokkaido.This gave special motivation to volunteers in Tokyo areas and in due
course of time the second book was completed there.In this way, movements to make tactile illustrated books grew up at various parts of the country.

We, Fureai Bunko, have also begun our activities 30 years ago to make tactile illustrated books by hand in our own special way as to be cited below, and started to lend them free by mail.We lend out yearly about 6,000 books out of our total 10,000 books.

As personal computors develop, various types of tactile illustrated books are produced today.In order to see what types of the book are now produced, I would like to summarize here about the types of such books.

(1) Cloth Picture book
All parts of this book including covers, pages and illustrations are made of textures.In some books,illustration parts are made detachable by snaps or tapes.This book is widely read not only by blind children but also by children who have troubles with their fingers or with mental difficulty.

(2) Tactile picture book
This is a book which is made up with cardboard pages on which short texts are written both in print and brailles beside the illustrations.The book is mainly read by visually impaired children, but sighted children can also enjoy.

(3) Braille illustrated book
This book is generally called touch and read book.All texts are written in braille and illustrations are indicated with dot marks.

(4) Braille picture book
This is the way we make books for our library.As it is complicated, I will show you here.
We buy picture books at bookstores and translate the texts into braille on pieces of transparent plastic peel-off seal.We stick these pieces in the original book.We also cut plastic seal in the shapes of the pictures and stick them in the original book.In some cases we add a short explanation to help unseeing readers understand what the pictures and the page of the original book are like Although we have various types of braille illustrated books , we have to realize that the number of such books actually produced are not increasing .In early 1979 a book with the title ” What Is This ? ” has been published by publishing company Kaiseisha, which was followed by two more new titles in the following two years.Further in 1983, another printing house Shogakkan started to publish a monthly book ” Terumi ” which is still on publication today.In 1996 we published a braille illustrated book in full colors, entitled “Choki Choki Chokkin ” (Happy crabs on the Beach) under the joint publication with printing house Kogumasha.In this book all the pictures and the letters are printed in raised color ink.

Upto the year of 2002, about 20 titles of brailled illustrated books have been published but some of them are already out of production .Under these circumstances, however, there are constantly swelling voices from among blind readers calling for more new books to read.I myself decided at this time to make an initiative move to organize a group of people working at various publishing companies .About 20 people gathered and all agreed to organize ” a group to push forward movements to accelerate publication of braille picture books “.This group was officially organized and decided to hold regular meeting twice an year.
The first thing we have done was to carry out a nation-wide investigation to find out how the production of brailled illustrated books proceedinmg.On the basis of this investigation, we made up leaflets and distributed them to all those who are concerned.

http://homepage1.nifty.com/fbunko/tenjiehon/index.htm

Since we have started our group activities, a total of 7 titles of new brailled picture books have been published by this member organizations in these 10 years.

Ms. Mitsuko Iwata (Chairman)
e-mail : namiyoke@ams.odn.ne.jp



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