Shin Retro Maru Gothic

Shin Retro Maru Gothic (新レトロ丸ゴシック) is a free-to-download Japanese rounded gothic font, designed with a very specific aesthetic reference in mind: the shasshoku (写植) era, when phototypesetting ruled Japanese print. That origin story is written all over the font’s kana — the counters are intentionally narrow, the strokes carry a subtle expressiveness, and the overall feel has that unmistakable Showa-to-Heisei nostalgia that you’d recognize from old magazine spreads or broadcast television captions. One design detail worth calling out specifically: the character “と” features its first stroke deliberately breaking through the form, which was a common characteristic of phototypeset faces of that period. It’s the sort of intentional quirk that signals a designer who’s paying close attention to typographic history rather than just rounding off a base font.

The glyph set is largely built on ZEN Maru Gothic, with the kana and select punctuation replaced with this font’s designer, Typographish’s own original designs. The font comes in three weights — Regular, Medium, and Bold — which covers you from body text all the way through to headlines. Two editions are available: one optimized for Adobe applications (Illustrator, Photoshop, etc.), where all three weights appear as a single font family with weight switching, and another for Office and other software, where each weight registers as a separate font. It’s a thoughtful distinction that saves a lot of frustration depending on your workflow. The font is released under the SIL Open Font License, so it’s free for both personal and commercial use.

Usage Permission

• Free for personal, non-commercial, and commercial use.
• Released under SIL Open Font License (OFL) 1.1.

Link

Font Homepage and Download

Supported characters

• Hiragana and Katakana
• Kanji (up to JIS Level 1 and 2)
• Alphanumerics
• Symbols and Punctuations