Japanese Keyboard if it helps:
The obvious “type the codes on the japanese keyboard” leads to gibberish.
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^^^ That’s a surprisingly symmetrical pattern of keys used… 
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If we assume a uniform dictionary of 38 letters and numbers and randomly select 80 characters from them, then on average we will pull 33 distinct letters., and there is less than a 1% chance of randomly selecting less than 30 distinct letters. So having only 28 distinct letters in our sample is unlikely to be by chance.
Here is our letter frequency:
Summary
‘0’: 7
‘B’: 7
‘2’: 6
‘D’: 6
‘A’: 4
‘1’: 4
‘G’: 4
‘5’: 3
‘6’: 3
‘7’: 3
‘F’: 3
‘I’: 3
‘L’: 3
‘P’: 3
‘Q’: 3
‘+’: 2
‘3’: 2
‘C’: 2
‘J’: 2
‘O’: 2
‘E’: 1
‘H’: 1
‘K’: 1
‘M’: 1
‘9’: 1
‘S’: 1
‘W’: 1
‘~’: 1
Letter frequency in the english language:
e t a o i n s r h l d c u m f p g w y b v k x j q z
List of kana frequency in japanese can be found here
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What the hell is that?!
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It’s beautiful that’s what it is
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You can use underscore sign as a “space” when a space is not allowed. This would then be truly symmetric.
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What if we do the oposite starting by 4 (し）death:
うすは
すかんな
けむ
つさひみねるめろ
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My reaction exactly. I’m sitting in an IKEA having lunch, and literally shrieked out loud seeing that. No one noticed, because IKEA. 
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One of the earlier experiments in typing in Kanji with a physical device. This has twelve kanji per key, there’s some keys with kana you can see in the center too. I think it’s an IBM 5556-005
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That looks like the result of a worker being told repeatedly to make a kanji keyboard but wasn’t given any help on how to make it happen and eventually he just said screw it. Here!
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That’s a 12x18 grid of keys, or 216 keys. And each key does 12 kanji. That’s 2592 kanji. And some poor soul had to sit down and engineer that, design it, build it, and make it work. They probably had to make it work with some ancient, reel-to-reel IBM mainframe too. Which means that every line of code they wrote to run the thing cost them. That’s not a kanji keyboard, that’s someone’s punishment for stealing the boss’s girlfriend or something.
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One idly wonders how you type on it. Do you need to push a key twelve times, old mobile phone style, or is there a modifier keypad you use with the left hand? Can just see a 3-key peeking out at the corner of the photo, so that’s possible.
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Maybe it has foot pedals, like an organ?
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15 shift keys.
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I feel like you have an overly-dramatic mental picture of how typing works. 
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Not really, but that thing is…special…
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When I was in high school, I played a prank on one of my classmates in computer class. Before class, I logged into his computer and ran a program I wrote that hooked into the keyboard driver (‘interrupt’, actually), chose a random key, and each time that key was pressed, it would swap with the next key that was pressed. So, over time, the more you type, the goofier it got. Is was hilarious to watch, but it didn’t get much further than about three swaps before he was convinced that the computer was broken. 
Now… imagine the same prank on that giant kanji keyboard!
(One of my friends from college used to tell me that it’s a good thing I never joined the dark side…hehe)
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I’m not sure I believe your story. You were never young and naive enough to be in high school!
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