I like the look of the Latin characters of Japanese Gothic fonts. ( Gothic is an older term for sans-serif, the latter term is not used in Asian typography because there are no serifs )
The letters look different because of the different stacking requirements (vertical) in Japanese writing—the descenders are really short.
I decided to adapt the Open Source font Sazanami and make the Latin characters suitable for use in graphic design with Western languages. More specifically, for the visualisation component of the installation / performance HYPERMAP which is part of Performance Studies International 17 taking part in Utrecht, the Netherlands, May 25–29 2011.
We start from the original font sans the embedded bitmap fonts, and subsetted to the Latin script. I used FontForge to do the subsetting and convert the font to UFO sources. We might apply patches back to the original project. I didn’t yet figure out the licence for Sazanami, but whatever it is we’ll do this project under the same terms :)
Sazanami project:
http://sourceforge.jp/projects/efont/releases/?package_id=2547
HYPERMAP
is an initative by Danslab and BIT /Bruno Listopad, Giulia Mureddu,
Jochem Naafs, Jette Schneider, Diane Elshout, together with Ola Maciejewska
and designer Eric Schrijver.
http://hypermap.bit-dansdramaturgie.nl/