5Controlling the Kanjisphere

Typists more than anyone must follow the times.

—Chinese typewriting manual, Manchukuo, 1932

It should … not be overlooked that these Japanese typewriters could also be used for correspondence in Chinese.

—Memo from treasurer to secretary general, Occupied Shanghai, 1943

“Pray for Free China.” So reads a sticker affixed to the Chinese typewriter I acquired in the summer of 2009. The machine came from a Christian church in San Francisco, where it had been used for years to compose the weekly church bulletin. “They were going to throw it away,” explained the man who had learned of my work and reached out by email. “I saved it in hopes that someone might find some way to appreciate such past technology.”1 The machine was a Double Pigeon Chinese typewriter produced on the mainland by the Shanghai Calculator and Typewriter Factory. With its signature pale green color, this was the typewriter of the Maoist period (1949–1976), and manufactured well into the 1980s and early 1990s.

The Californians who owned this machine had subverted the device’s national and party affiliations, however. On the sticker that “prayed for Free China,” the flag of the Nationalist, or Guomindang, party was featured prominently, pledging political allegiance to the Taiwanese government-in-exile (or “renegade province,” in Beijing’s parlance). The machine’s allegiance was further pledged to the United States, with a second sticker on the machine featuring the American bald eagle, grasping arrows in its talons. Poised menacingly next to the pair of unarmed pigeons, the device’s official logo, the eagle stood as testament to the late Cold War period in which the machine had been in service.

In what ways can objects be said to have politics, however, not in the technolinguistic sense explored thus far, but in conventional terms of party politics, national identity, and the like? Does it matter who builds an inscription device, in the sense of the engineer’s or company’s place of origin or ideological leanings—or are technological devices inherently neutral, nationless, cosmopolitan citizens of the world? Did it matter in any way, in other words, that a machine manufactured in the People’s Republic of China had been employed by a pro-Taiwan, Christian Chinese church in the United States? Or are technological objects by their very nature agnostic with respect to these all-too-human concerns? These are some of the questions we will take up in this chapter.

The following year, another episode brought these same questions surging back to my consciousness in unexpected ways. Summer 2010 found me in London on a congested ride from Hounslow Central Station to Covent Garden, with an unremarkable matte brown suitcase to my left. Inside its stiff acrylic walls, sheets of crumpled wallpaper samples held in place the central component of another Chinese typewriter, this one built in the 1960s. Neither this suitcase nor its contents had belonged to me just hours earlier, but instead to a Malaysian Chinese-British family living in the suburbs of London along the outermost stretch of the Piccadilly Line. This typewriter had been purchased in Singapore, employed in Malaysia, shipped to London, and was now en route to my office at Stanford University. This would become the second machine in my growing collection, and one whose national identity was even more complicated than that of the first, I had discovered.2

When I arrived at the home of the Tai family, I was greeted warmly and guided to a room in the rear of the house. Evelyn sat down at the desk and began to demonstrate the machine I had been invited to see. “I haven’t touched it in twenty years,” she began. “I’ll try my best.” Evelyn began to type, and I asked her how she had come to learn the locations of more than two thousand characters. Her response was modest, as if to dismiss the feat of memory. “I just remember it.” She expanded somewhat on this answer, explaining how Chinese radicals, or bushou, were the key, just as we saw in chapter 4 when we examined typewriting schools and curricula in early twentieth-century China. When learning the layout of the machine, she explained, she had started by learning that all characters of such-and-such radical were located in such-and-such zone. Over time, though, this conscious act of study and memorization had clearly given way to muscle memory. “Say I want xin [新 ‘new’],” Evelyn remarked casually, beginning to move the character selector across the typewriter tray bed. “Straightaway you know xin is here.”

Everything about Evelyn’s machine seemed deeply personal. In a small, four-by-three-inch plastic box, she kept a special set of characters she could reach and, using tweezers, place on her machine in one of the empty slots in the matrix. Like the characters on the Huntington machine discussed in chapter 4, whose character tray bed still testifies to the life and times of its owner, Evelyn’s characters testified to her Christian faith and the clerical work she performed as a member of her church: immortal/saint (仙 xian), to save (拯 zheng), the exceedingly rare third-person pronoun reserved for God (祂 ta). Others were not so easily deciphered, as in gao (糕) and qiu (丘)—most likely the surnames of church members who appeared regularly in the weekly bulletins that had been typed on this machine.

The machine was deeply personal for Evelyn’s daughter, as well. During her mother’s demonstration, Maria stood just behind us, listening to her mother’s explanations. Unlike the rest of her immediate family, all of whom were born in Malaysia, Maria had been born in Singapore after the first of the family’s emigrations. There Maria’s father had worked as an assistant lecturer at Trinity College, while her mother worked as a kindergarten teacher at a school associated with a local Methodist church (they themselves being Presbyterian). Evelyn purchased her Chinese machine in Singapore and used it to type up lecture materials at Trinity, as well as church programs and orders of worship. While Maria was still an infant, her mother had taken a three-month intensive course in Chinese typewriting administered by the Adult Education Board of Singapore, passing the certification exam in October 1972. The family moved again, this time to London, where her father was to serve as a chaplain at the United Reform Church. They disassembled and shipped most of the machine, all except for the platen. This they had packed inside a matte brown, acrylic suitcase—the very piece of luggage that they would soon turn over to me.

Throughout these many travels, the sound of her mother’s typewriter was a constant for Maria, providing some measure of continuity during an itinerant childhood. At home, with her daughter sometimes helping her, Evelyn typed up Chinese-language programs for her church, making copies using stencil paper. Other organizations and outfits requested her help as well, such as local community centers and nearby schools and churches. When she was not helping her mother, Maria explained, she could still hear the muffled yet distinct sound of the machine through the walls of the house, late at night. The sound would accompany her as she dozed off in her bed. Here in 2010, as she watched her mother demonstrate the machine to me, she interjected almost inaudibly: “It makes me fall asleep, that sound.”

When first I set out on my research, little could I have known that a conversation in the suburbs of London would present the opportunity to delve into an intimate history of the Chinese typewriter. Over the span of those few hours, I was able to put aside the many questions of politics we have examined thus far—the politics of how Chinese typewriting was understood in the alphabetic world, the politics of the common usage approach to Chinese technolinguistic modernity, the politics of divisible type printing, and more—and instead catch strobing glimpses of the place this one particular apparatus had held in one woman’s life for more than two decades. It was one of the “evocative objects” of her world, to cite Sherry Turkle’s a propos formulation.3 The machine even shared her name, with an embossed label reading “Evelyn” affixed to the front of the chassis. “This is my one,” she remarked to me, “from beginning to end.”

As quickly as politics had receded from view, however, they burst forth once again, this time in a remarkably different light. As I looked over the apparatus, a small plaque affixed to the rear of the chassis caught my attention, and instantly complicated the romantic portrait I had been painting in my mind. Upon this plaque was embossed:

“Chinese Typewriter Company Limited Stock Corporation. Japanese Business Machines Limited.”

This Chinese typewriter was Japanese.

An entirely new conversation ensued, returning us to the day, many decades earlier, when Evelyn and her husband had first purchased the machine at a shop in Singapore. The store had on offer a selection of Chinese typewriters, she recalled, including the same Double Pigeon model that was waiting for me back at home. Double Pigeon was by far the most widely used Chinese typewriter at that time, both in China and internationally, in large part because it was one of the only models of Chinese typewriter being produced on the mainland.

The other model on offer was the Superwriter, built by Japanese Business Machines, Ltd. Structurally and linguistically, the principles of the machines were identical, both featuring common usage tray beds upon which were arrayed a collection of approximately 2,500 Chinese characters. The typing mechanisms operated identically, as well. Using his or her right hand, the operator guided the character selector device over the top of the desired character, depressing the type bar at the appropriate time. The main question for Evelyn was the reputation of Japanese and Chinese manufacturing more broadly. Should she purchase a Chinese typewriter built in China, or one built in Japan?

As every historian knows, brief and passing moments like this have the capacity to reroute us, hurtling us down unexpected paths that can require years to traverse, but leave us richer for the journey. Working through my archives again, and expanding into new collections in Tokyo, questions came into focus I had not contemplated before: Over the course of modern history, who controlled the means of Chinese textual production and transmission—when, how, and to what ends?

By this point in my research, I knew full well that global giants like Remington, Underwood, Olivetti, and Mergenthaler Linotype had all tried and failed to enter the Chinese-language market, let alone capture it. Standing in Evelyn’s living room, the question reemerged: What about Japan? If Western manufacturers had proven unable to bring the Chinese language into their ever-expanding repertoire of world scripts—and increasingly unable to imagine what a typewriter might look like for a nonalphabetic script—what about companies and engineers in Japan, where nonalphabetic Chinese characters—or kanji—formed a core part of the Japanese language? And how might this history relate to the contemporary concept of “CJK,” a catch-all term within contemporary computing that refers to “Chinese, Japanese, and Korean” information processing, font production, and more?4 As I looked upon this Japanese-made Chinese typewriter, was I in fact looking at the “prehistory” of CJK?

In this chapter, we examine the braided histories of Japanese typewriting and Japan’s takeover of the Chinese typewriting industry. Although the apotheosis of the Western-style keyboard typewriter had placed China and Chinese irretrievably beyond the pale of technolinguistic modernity as understood by multinational companies like Remington, the history of Japanese multinationals was an altogether different one. Japan was home to two distinct approaches to typewriting, one oriented exclusively toward the typing of Japanese kana—the twin syllabaries, hiragana or katakana—and the other oriented toward character-based writing (kanji). In look and feel, the first family of machines was indistinguishable from those built by Remington, Underwood, or Olivetti. The second family, meanwhile, was indistinguishable from those built in China. Occupying this liminal position, Japanese engineers were in many ways less imaginatively confined than their Western counterparts, never restricting themselves to a keyboard-based system incapable of handling characters. Instead, Japan succeeded where Remington failed by developing the very same tray bed–based common usage machines with which Chinese typists had become familiar.

Japanese companies made inroads into the Chinese market as early as the 1920s, a process that accelerated quickly with the expansion of Japanese empire-building in northeast China in 1931, and then with the outbreak of full-scale war in 1937. By the late 1930s and 1940s, Japan dominated the Chinese typewriter market, and would continue to exert influence well into the early postwar period (as exemplified in Evelyn Tai’s choice of Superwriter). CJK, it turns out, has a violent past, inseparable from the rise and fall of the Japanese empire and the horrors of the Second World War.

Between Technolinguistic Worlds: Kana, Kanji, and the Ambivalent History of Japanese Typewriting

Beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century, China’s neighbor to the east began to wrestle with its own questions of technolinguistic modernity, as exemplified in the history of Japanese telegraphy, telephony, industrialized printing, post, stenotype, and more.5 As Ryōshin Minami has shown, Japan’s printing industry was one of the country’s earliest and most thoroughly mechanized.6 Beginning in 1876, the application of steam power to printing revolutionized the domestic newspaper industry, enabling Japanese publishers to keep pace with a voracious and growing appetite for daily newspapers.7 During the second half of the nineteenth century, telephone and telegraph technologies were introduced in a timeline that runs roughly parallel to that of the Qing.8 In 1871, the same year Great Northern and Cable and Wireless promulgated the Chinese telegraph code, a telegraph code for Japanese kana was authored as well. Known alternately as the Japansk Telegrafnøgle (Japanese telegraph key) or Denshin jigō (telegraph signals), the code assigned short and long pulses to Japanese katakana syllables, arranged according to the predominant dictionary sequence of the era, the iroha taxonomic system (named after the eponymous Heian-era poem).9 With the Japanese state’s establishment of a monopoly over telecommunications and postal services, and with the expansion of Japan’s overseas informal and formal empire in the 1880s and 1890s, this network began to expand rapidly.10

The history of typewriting in Japan is inseparable from the broader history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century language reform and modernization efforts in East Asia, as well as the era’s widespread critique of character-based writing. Indeed, calls for the abolition of characters began sounding in Korea and Japan before they did in China. As part of “decentering the Middle Kingdom,” in the apt terminology of one historian, a branch of Korean reformers began to particularize and de-universalize symbols and ideologies inherited from the Chinese cultural sphere. Believing that a “break with the transnational culturalism of the East Asian past was necessary,” these reformers reserved particular enmity for hanja—Chinese character-based script that had been imported and applied to the Korean language many centuries prior—regarding it as a fundamental hindrance to the project of scientific (read Western) development.11 Once regarded as the chinmun or “truth script,” the character-based component of the Korean writing system steadily became particularized as foreign—as Chinese characters judged “merely in terms of their merits and a communicative tool.”12 Hanja came to be understood as irredeemably wedded to the very doctrines of Confucianism and Daoism now under attack as inherently antimodern. Bringing to mind Ernest Gellner and later Benedict Anderson’s examination of “truth language”—hierolects such as church Latin, Old Church Slavonic, or “examination Chinese” that were once understood to offer exclusive access to the canon of truth—the privileged position of such language necessarily eroded once this underlying truth was increasingly regarded as false.13

Japanese reformers mounted strikingly similar arguments during this same period, attempting to decouple their country’s fate from the sick man of Asia and thereby partake in the global project of modernity.14 In 1866, Maejima Hisoka, translator at the Bureau for Development of Foreign Studies, presented a petition to the Shogun Yoshinobu entitled “Proposal for the Abolition of Chinese Characters” in which he advocated the replacement of kanji with kana.15 With the objective of increasing the efficiency of writing and accelerating the pace of language education, Maejima established the company Keimōsha in 1873 to produce the all-kana newspaper Daily Hiragana News (Mainichi hiragana shinbun). Although the paper failed within its first year, advocates of kana such as Shimizu Usaburō, in his 1874 essay “On Hiragana,” elaborated further upon Maejima’s proposal.16

The first Japanese typewriter was a kana-only machine, containing no kanji whatsoever. Patterned after the single-shift keyboard machines growing in prominence worldwide, and designed to type the hiragana syllabary, this machine was completed in 1894 by Kurosawa Teijirō (1875–1953). Kurosawa soon turned his attention to the development of a katakana machine, which he completed in 1901. Basing his production on the Elliott model Smith-Corona machine, Kurosawa went on to name his machine the Japanese Smith Typewriter, or sumisu taipuraitā.17

Kana typewriting opened the door to Western manufacturers, an opportunity they wasted no time in seizing. As early as 1905, Remington brought Japanese into its immense and expanding repertoire of world scripts, seizing upon kana-only design as a means of entering the East Asian market while at the same time circumventing the intransigent problem of kanji. Salesmen were offered guidance in how to field questions that might come up from customers, particularly those wondering about the conspicuous absence of kanji on the Remington device. “The Kana, and especially the Katakana,” the salesperson was instructed to respond, “represent the ancient Japanese tongue, but Japan received from China many centuries ago most of her classical literature and advanced learning and adopted the Chinese character for her writing.” “In a word, it is impossible to make the machine write the multitude of Chinese symbols commonly used in even ordinary daily routine writing by the Japanese.”18 By means of the kana typewriter, Japan gained entry into the broader cultural repertoire of typewriting: the technosomatic discipline, pedagogical regime, aurality, and more. As in Paris, Beirut, Cairo, and New York, manuals on kana typewriting introduced trainees to the “correct typewriting posture” (tadashii taipuraichingu no shisei), the “correct form for the fingers” (tadashii shushi no keitai), and the “allocation [of keys] to each finger” (kaku yubi no bundan).19 Kana typewriting also made it possible for Japan to take part in the global romance of the Western-style typewriter—the poetry of it, its iconic style, and even artwork produced on it. In a textbook from 1923, for example, we are struck by three works of typewriter art attributed to one “T. Koga”: the figure of Rodin’s Thinker, a visage of Jesus Christ, and a map of North America, each built up from successive keystrokes.20

From its inception, the all-kana typewriter was a machine with a politics, wherein modernization was premised on cutting the Japanese language’s ties with its Chinese orthographic heritage. The trope of the impossible, monstrous Chinese typewriter examined in chapter 1 was here mobilized in a Japanese context as a kind of cautionary tale (lest Japan too find itself excommunicated from the universe of modernity). “All educated natives of Japan that we have consulted seem to agree,” Remington reported, “that the current method of writing Japanese is cumbersome and antiquated, and utterly unsuited to the present needs of their people.” What was called for in Japan was “replacing the present badly mixed system with a purely phonetic one.” “It is quite within the bounds of possibility that the advent of the Remington Typewriter for writing Katakana may point a way toward bringing about this change.”21

Remington soon faced competition from other global firms keen on entering the East Asian arena. In February 1915, the Underwood corporation sponsored the patent of its own katakana typewriter, developed by Yanagiwara Sukeshige. Eight years later, Underwood sponsored another katakana typewriter patent, this one by Burnham Stickney, who had served as the patent attorney for Yanagiwara.22 Remington quickly fired back at its competitor at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915 (the same expo where a young Qi Xuan demonstrated his experimental Chinese typewriter, to much less fanfare). Remington’s pavilion spotlighted an all-kana Japanese machine, operated by an eye-catching young Japanese-American woman named Tsugi Kitahara. “Greetings from the Panama-Pacific to our friends throughout the world,” read the company’s promotional postcard sporting her photo, “writing the 156 languages for which Remingtons are made.—Tsugi Kitahara.”23

Kanji typewriters were not developed until fifteen years after their all-kana predecessors. For their part, these machines were deeply connected to a vibrant counterpart to the all-kana movement: the common usage kanji movement. In 1873, journalist, political theorist, and translator Fukuzawa Yukichi (1834–1901) authored a three-volume educational text for children using fewer than one thousand characters. In the explanation of his work, entitled The Teaching of Words, Fukuzawa opined that somewhere in the range of two to three thousand kanji characters would prove more than adequate—with the balance of Japanese writing to be expressed in kana.24 Between the time of Fukuzawa’s Moji in 1873 and the May 1923 “List of Characters for General Use” presented by the Interim Committee on the National Language, numerous scholars, statesmen, and educators weighed in on the question of “common usage kanji.”25 In his 1887 reference work The Three Thousand Character Dictionary, Yana Fumio proposed that around three thousand would be sufficient.26 Three decades later, a consortium of Tokyo- and Osaka-based newspaper publishers issued a joint statement on March 21, 1921, entitled “Advocating the Restriction of the Number of Kanji.”27 Following publication of the May 1923 issue, many of the same newspapers offered vocal support, pledging to adhere to this repertoire of kanji in their publications, to begin on September 1, 1923. This plan was laid to waste, however, in the destruction of the Kanto earthquake, delaying the question for another two years.28

One of the earliest technological manifestations of this branch of Japanese language reform was the kanji typewriter invented by Sugimoto Kyōta (1882–1972). As early as 1914, he reported nearing completion on a working prototype, and in October of the following year he was heralded by the Tokyo Chamber of Commerce for the device that would come to be known quite simply as the “Japanese Typewriter,” or Hōbun taipuraitā—maintaining the phoneticized loan word employed decades earlier by kana typewriter developers.29 In November 1916, he filed his invention with the United States Patent Office, receiving his patent one year later.30 It was not long before Sugimoto’s typewriter met with competition, moreover. The Oriental Typewriter invented by Shimada Minokichi soon appeared on the market. This was followed by the Otani Japanese Typewriter, invented by Kataoka Kotarō and manufactured by the Otani Typewriter Company. Toshiba released its own Japanese typewriter around 1935. Premised on common usage like the others, this machine featured a character cylinder rather than a flat tray bed (figure 5.1).31

9776_005_fig_001.jpg

5.1 Japanese typewriters; from Watabe Hisako [渡部久子], Japanese Typewriter Textbook (Hōbun taipuraitā tokuhon) [邦文タイプライター讀本] (Tokyo: Sūbundō [崇文堂], 1929), front plate

For all their diversity, these machines and their manufacturers shared common design principles and entrepreneurial goals. In terms of structure, each machine included only a limited and carefully chosen collection of common usage Japanese kanji, organized phonetically according to the iroha system.32 Meanwhile, manufacturers centered their marketing campaigns around a set of core principles: accuracy, beauty, legibility, and the saving of labor, time, and paper.33

As in China, a pedagogical network built up around the kanji typewriter that was responsible for training a new labor force. Unlike China, however, Japan’s typing schools were attended almost exclusively by young women, the industry characterized by a feminization of this secretarial labor force on par with the more familiar contexts of Europe and the United States, as well as with other communications industries in Japan itself (figure 5.2).34 In Japan, a survey of professional women conducted in Tokyo and Osaka in the late 1920s offers us a glimpse of the country’s clerical workforce. Of the nearly thousand women surveyed, more than half were under the age of twenty and over 90 percent were unmarried. Educational backgrounds varied, with roughly 40 percent having no more than lower school education, and slightly more having backgrounds in girls’ schools. The plurality of women worked in government or public office, followed by private companies and banks.35

9776_005_fig_002.jpg

5.2 Photograph of Japanese typist Kay Tsuchiya, 1937 (author’s personal collection)

During the 1920s, Japanese typewriter manufacturers helped fortify the gendered parameters of the typing profession through the publication of a new periodical, Taipisuto. Founded circa 1925, and published by the Japanese Typist Association (Hōbun taipisuto kyōkai), the monthly was part professional journal, part women’s magazine, each issue featuring crisp, bold art deco graphics and cover art dedicated to the portrayal of the modern Japanese woman in all her many forms (whether outfitted in smart business attire, athletic outfits, or traditional kimonos).36 Inside could be found a spectrum of content, ranging from Tanka poetry and beauty tips to explorations of the life and profession of the Japanese typist and long-form essays on issues confronting Japanese women in general (figure 5.3). Advertisements abounded, whether for the Nippon Typewriter Company or for women’s consumer products. The journal featured extensive photographic content as well, a common subject being group photos of graduating classes looking ahead optimistically to the work that awaited them.

9776_005_fig_003.jpg

5.3 Japanese typist magazine Taipisuto 12, no. 12 (December 1942—Showa 16): cover

Japanese-Made Chinese Typewriters, or the Advent of the Modern Kanjisphere

By the early 1930s, Japan was home to a variety of typewriter models, divided into two broad worlds: the world of kana typewriting, which partook in the globally recognizable culture of Remington, Underwood, and Olivetti; and that of kanji typewriting, which, owing to its intimate affiliation with typewriting in China, was excluded from this global technolinguistic culture. The ambitions of Japanese typewriter designers extended well beyond their own country and language, however. In his 1916 patent, Sugimoto Kyōta was careful to point out that his typewriter was “designed for the Japanese and Chinese languages.”37 When inventor Shinozawa Yūsaku of Tokyo filed a June 1918 patent claim, he likewise characterized the new typewriter as one adapted for “a language in which a large number of characters are used, such as the Japanese or the Chinese language.”38 Whether as an afterthought or a catalytic part of their invention process, inventors of machines for the Japanese language made explicit the larger aspirations and stakes of their projects: a market that encompassed East Asia as a whole.39

That Japanese inventors should have conceptualized their projects in terms of a broader Chinese-Japanese (and soon Chinese-Japanese-Korean) market is hardly surprising. The Chinese market would have exerted an irresistible pull on the minds of inventors, offering up the prospect that a Japanese kanji machine could, in theory, readily be made to “handle” Chinese as well. Beyond the question of markets, moreover, there existed a longstanding history of shared cultural heritage between China, Japan, and Korea—the very “transnational culturalism” that many Korean and Japanese reformers had attempted to dismantle beginning in the late nineteenth century, but which typewriter inventors and engineers in the 1910s and 1920s were now setting out to rediscover and render profitable. As Douglas Howland and Daniel Trambaiolo explain, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean diplomats and embassies in the eighteenth century frequently employed “brushtalk” (Chinese bitan, Japanese hitsudan, Korean p’ildam) as a medium of written conversation in contexts when oral communication was unavailable. If an official spoke little or none of his counterpart’s language, the “solution to this difficulty—indeed the original design for these primarily entertaining encounters—was to converse by writing in hanzi, or kanji, the Chinese characters used by educated men for literary and official communications.”40

Whereas the very possibility of a “Chinese-Japanese” typewriter derived its conditions of possibility from the long history of this Sinic transnational sphere, the underlying assumptions and preoccupations that motivated this twentieth-century enterprise were starkly different from those found in the translingual exchanges of centuries past. For inventors and engineers, the elision of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean—or “CJK,” as it would come to be abbreviated during the second half of the twentieth century—was not motivated by affirmative notions of shared civilization (tongwen) or of a “language community defined by their collective competence with the Chinese writing of the brushtalks.”41 It was motivated by the stark, turn-of-the-century logic of the collective technolinguistic crisis that Japan and Korea were now understood to face alongside China precisely because of this shared cultural heritage. The nineteenth- and twentieth-century emergence of a radically new and powerful global information order had not only expelled China from the universe of technolinguistic modernity, then, but had also transformed Japan and Korea into unwitting co-participants in China’s technolinguistic woes. By virtue of their orthographic heritage—kanji, hanja, and hanziJapan, Korea, and China were conjoined in a newly conceived spatial-informational crisis zone. Here, I will refer to this as the kanjisphere.

Western perceptions of the Japanese kanji machine further reinforced this notion of a shared zone of technolinguistic crisis. In sharp contrast to the all-kana typewriters described above, which were celebrated globally as Japan’s passport to the land of technological modernity, scorn and mockery were heaped upon kanji machines in ways not unlike those we have seen with the Chinese typewriter. In an extensive article for the New York Times, for example, Mary Badger Wilson reported that “there are two great languages … used by many millions of persons, to which our machines cannot be completely adapted. These are the Japanese and Chinese tongues.”42 Writing about a Japanese typewriter she witnessed in operation at the Japanese embassy in Washington, DC, Wilson reveled in what was by then the common idiom of the machine’s onerous size, as well as the impressive—if not impossible—demands it placed upon the memory of the operator. “There are some three thousand characters used in the machine,” Wilson continued, “and the Japanese typist must memorize the position of each one in order to attain the high speed demanded!”43 In another article, from 1937, we see more denigrating representations of Chinese and Japanese machines:

Stenographers who think they are overworked should call on Kathleen Tsu­chiya at the Japanese chamber of commerce. She pounds out letters in English on an American typewriter then “hunts and pecks” over the 3,500 separate ideographs of a Japanese typewriter to produce a string of hieroglyphics.44

As always, however, the most stinging barbs were those of greatest brevity: “Overheard at a literary cocktail party: ‘A Russian novel always contains more characters than a Japanese typewriter.’”45

If the kanjisphere was defined by the idea of shared crisis, so too was it marked by a powerful and subversive optimism—bringing us to a second vital difference that separates newer and older conceptualizations of the East Asian cultural sphere. Embedded within the practice of eighteenth-century brushtalk was a potent if often unspoken cultural hierarchy, one in which the medium of exchange was itself derived from, and thus privileged, literary Chinese. In the age of the modern kanjisphere, by contrast, China and the written Chinese language enjoyed absolutely no paradigmatic authority. To the contrary, once China and Chinese characters had been reconceptualized as a communicative problem—a puzzle in need of a solution rather than a medium of communicative possibility—this opened up a new, exciting, and lucrative possibility for Japanese and Korean inventors, one in which Japan and Korea could be transformed from the beneficiaries of Chinese cultural inheritance to sites where the puzzle of East Asian technolinguistic modernity might itself be solved. The “Chinese solution” was equally available to, and the purview of, Japanese and Korean engineers—as well as to foreigners working on Japanese and Korean questions from elsewhere on the globe. For inventors like Sugimoto and others, then, the modern kanjisphere was home to an exhilarating prospect: that the solution of one’s “own” problem—the creation of a kanji typewriter, or a hanja typewriter—carried with it the lucrative “positive externality” of solving the Chinese puzzle as well, with everything this implied financially, geopolitically, and culturally.

Over the course of the 1920s, Japanese manufacturers competed head-on with Commercial Press, China’s foremost center of print capitalism during the era and, as examined in the preceding chapter, manufacturer of China’s first commercially successful Chinese typewriter—the Shu-style machine. Tellingly, it was only in this context that Japanese inventors and manufacturers jettisoned the commonly used katakana-inflected loan word “taipuraitā” [タイプライタ] and replaced it with the Chinese-character term daziji [打字機], attempting to establish Japanese-built machines as an identical yet superior solution to the puzzle of Chinese typewriting. The potential payoff of such competition should not be understated, moreover. If Japanese companies could succeed where Remington, Underwood, Mergenthaler Linotype, Olivetti, and other Western companies had tried and failed, the market that remained closed to the United States, Italy, Germany, and others might very well open up to Japan. Whereas Japan formed but a small part of the global culture of keyboard typewriting, then, opportunity existed to become the technolinguistic hegemon of the modern kanjisphere.

Chinese-language typewriters built by Japanese manufacturers were based upon design principles identical to those of their Chinese-built counterparts, Chinese observers would quickly learn. The machines were outfitted with a tray bed matrix of approximately 2,500 characters, arranged into zones of greater and lesser frequency.46 Abandoning iroha organization, moreover, and dispensing with kana symbols, these machines adopted conventional radical-stroke organization, the standard means by which Chinese typewriter tray beds—as well as dictionaries and other reference materials—were organized at the time. Such minor changes notwithstanding, these machines would have struck any observer as effectively identical to the apparatus developed by Commercial Press.

It was not market competition, however, but military might and war that in the end secured Japan’s preeminent place in the Chinese typewriter market. On January 28, 1932, Japanese pilots from the Imperial Army flew sorties over the densely populated Zhabei commercial district of Shanghai, dropping six bombs on the offices of Commercial Press, and visiting destruction on virtually the entire facility. The company’s machine shop—home to the company’s Chinese typewriter division along with other enterprises—was largely spared, but the conflagration assuredly arrested their marketing efforts for a time.47 Meanwhile, to the north, Japanese military forces consolidated their recent invasion of northeast China through formation of the Japanese-controlled client state of Manchukuo. By force of arms and engineers, Japan set out to become the dominant technolinguistic force in the East Asian kanjisphere.

With the establishment of Manchukuo in particular, the recruitment of secretaries and bureaucrats from mainland Japan quickly followed, as did the establishment of typing institutes. Here, cohorts of Chinese clerks-in-training would be instructed in the use of Japanese typewriters and Japanese-built Chinese typewriters.48 One such outfit was the Fengtian Typing Professional School, founded circa 1932, where training manuals and curricula resembled those we witnessed in chapter 4, but with certain noteworthy differences.49 Like their counterparts in Shanghai, Beijing, and other Chinese metropoles to the south, trainees moved through lessons and lexical geometries to help them develop an embodied familiarity with the tray bed and its layout. At the same time, the content of these lessons now reflected a decidedly different political vision—the Japanese vision for Manchukuo. In a 1932 textbook for clerks and secretaries, editor and Fengtian institute affiliate Li Xianyan guided readers through an assortment of the new intra- and interdepartmental forms they could expect to encounter, many of which must have seemed familiar to anyone with prior training. The fourth chapter of Li’s textbook was something entirely different, however: a section dedicated to stationery and government forms “for use by the emperor” (huangdi yong zhi gongwen). Here in Manchukuo, Chinese typewriters would be used for the first (and only) time in history to write imperial edicts (zhaoshu) and imperial rescripts (chokugo), in this case on behalf of the Kangde Emperor—better known as Puyi, the child emperor of the Qing who had been deposed following the revolution of 1911, but restored some twenty years later by his Japanese patrons.50

Both ethnopolitically and linguistically, typing schools in Manchukuo were complex diagrams of power and conflicting allegiance. Here at the Fengtian institute, and soon in sites across Manchukuo, Chinese typewriters built by Japanese engineers were to be used by Chinese typists, themselves trained in Japanese-sponsored institutes. Their communiqués and memos, in turn, were all in service of the Japanese client-state of Manchukuo, authored on behalf of, among others, the rehabilitated Manchu emperor of the former Qing dynasty. No doubt aware of the politically charged nature of this complex arrangement, Li Xianyan included a preface in his manual carefully tailored for his Chinese readers. “Every country has its own particular official correspondence, as does each time period,” it began. “They evolve in accordance with the condition of the country and with customs.”

To that end, in writing a book explaining stationery, one must also follow the times and reform. This is incontrovertible. Typists are personnel whose responsibility it is to record and copy public documents. As such, typists more than anyone must follow the times and learn new forms of stationery. Only then can they fulfill their duties and match the day and age.51

Li’s was hardly a poetic or impassioned apology for collaboration. Rather, the dryness of his words matched the rather bloodless content of his textbook. Muted though they were, however, Li’s comments on stationery and correspondence carried with them an unmistakable message: here in Manchukuo, in this territory carved off of the Chinese nation-state by military force, politics are not what they once were. You are studying to become a secretary in the state of Manchukuo, not China. Typists must follow the times.

Piracy and Patriotism: Yu Binqi and His Chinese-Japanese-Chinese Machine

Chinese inventors and manufacturers watched as the Chinese typewriter—this hard-won icon of modernity whose tortuous path we have traced out over five decades thus far—steadily became the purview of Japanese multinationals. In 1919, an unnamed contributor to Shenbao worried aloud about how this could have happened, laying blame on China’s weak patent regime, which left a gateway ajar to Japanese businesses to bring their own “Chinese” machines to market.52 Come the 1930s, Japan was seizing the market, not only to the north in Manchukuo, but also in major Chinese metropoles. The solution to the puzzle of Chinese typewriting, and the means of modern Chinese textual production more broadly, was falling into the hands of East Asia’s emerging power, and the single greatest threat to Chinese sovereignty. What was to be done?

One possible answer came from an unlikely source: a swimmer and Ping-Pong champion by the name of Yu Binqi. Born in Sushan, Zhejiang, in 1901, Yu Binqi went on to graduate from Southeast University of Commerce before pursuing postgraduate training in Japan at the National University of Commerce and the engineering program at Waseda University.53 Following a brief stint in the military, his professional career took him further into the world of sports and physical education, first as the managing director of the Shanghai Central Stadium, later as a member of the swimming division of the Chinese National Physical Education Federation, and still later as head of the National Ping-Pong Association. Owing perhaps to this long career in sports, and his notoriety as a talented swimmer, Yu also enjoyed something of a heartthrob status, his debonair visage brightening the cover of Boyfriend magazine in 1932 (figure 5.4).54

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5.4 Yu Binqi

Yu Binqi was an amateur inventor as well, patenting creations that included a new model of travel pillow and an economical water heater. His most famous invention, however, was undoubtedly the common usage Chinese typewriter he developed and began manufacturing in the 1930s—a patent that relied on the slightest of adjustments of an existing machine, and which would soon land Yu in political dire straits.55

Yu Binqi’s son, Yu Shuolin (b. 1925), though only a toddler at the time, recalled memories of the workshop his father established, tucked away in the back room on the second story of their home on Zhoujiazui Road, in the Hongkou district of Shanghai. On the first floor, a meeting room was available to host guests and clients, with a private office in the back. On the second floor of the “foreign-style” or yangfang building was a bedroom, and behind the entire structure was a manufacturing workshop outfitted with a kitchen and some dormitory rooms for workers.56

In the entrepreneurial style befitting this Shanghai urbanite, Yu Binqi founded his own institute of typing: the Yu Binqi Advanced Chinese Typing and Shorthand Professional Supplementary School—or, in its shorter version, the Yu Binqi Chinese Typing Professional School (Yu Binqi Zhong­wen dazi zhiye xuexiao).57 Classes were held on the first floor of his office, and within a few years the school boasted a small but well-educated staff of five people.58 Serving as director of Chinese typing was the school’s only female member, Jin Shuqing, a graduate of the Zhejiang University School of Agronomy, a former typing instructor at the Nanjing Municipal Professional School, and soon Yu Binqi’s mistress.59 Wang Yi served as director of shorthand, having joined the school in 1935 after graduating from the National Language Shorthand Institute. Wang had also served as a member of the Ministry of Education’s National Language Unification Preparatory Committee.60

A typical cohort for Yu’s school was roughly ten students. The school encouraged both male and female students to apply, provided that applicants possessed a high school–level education or the commensurate level of professional experience. Classes were to be completed over the course of five months, and addressed such subjects as the use of Chinese character indexes, mimeograph, machine repair, and a typing practicum. Tuition varied depending upon one’s course of study, with typing classes and shorthand classes each costing thirty yuan. Following graduation, moreover, Yu Binqi and his associates were active in helping students find employment—a cornerstone of his marketing strategy, as with the typing schools we examined in chapter 4. By helping to place his graduates in government posts and private companies, he not only raised the prestige of the institute, but also opened up avenues through which to insinuate the Yu-style machine into the Chinese market. Yu’s school boasted an impressive track record in this regard.61

At first glance, Yu Binqi would seem to have been China’s answer to the Japanese manufacturing threat. Here was a dashing, cosmopolitan urbanite who practically overnight had established himself as a typewriter magnate, competing not only with Japanese typewriter companies but also with his far better funded counterparts at Commercial Press. He developed a multipronged organization—complete with manufacturing, commercial, and pedagogical branches. He was also a charismatic and unrelenting entrepreneur with a flair for flamboyant gestures. When we look closely at the tray bed of the Yu Binqi Chinese typewriter, for example, we discover that Yu even smuggled his own name into the matrix of common usage characters, embedding his surname yu in the matrix at column 69, row 33, and the characters of his name bin and qi at coordinates 61:10 and 56:10. While we can perhaps excuse his inclusion of the character yu—a common character on its own—the inclusion of the highly infrequent bin and qi was nothing short of bravado. That no other typewriter manufacturers would dream of sacrificing precious lexical space for such characters was, indeed, precisely the point—the entrepreneur’s silent expletive to the world, in a move that would anticipate later gestures by coders and their embedded messages in the age of computer programming.

A closer look at Yu Binqi’s career reveals a more complicated trajectory than this patriotic story would otherwise suggest, however, one whose Chinese national bona fides becomes less clear the deeper we dig. Yu Binqi called his invention a “Chinese typewriter,” and yet a more faithful appellation might have been a “slightly modified Japanese machine.” Specifically, Yu began studying the H-style Japanese typewriter sometime around 1930, transforming one small component thereof and rechristening it the Yu Binqi Chinese Typewriter. The only part of the original Japanese machine to be modified was the “character positioning device,” a component of the machine that helped ensure accurate positioning of the character’s impression on the printed page. Changes to this component constituted the sole basis of Yu Binqi’s successful patent application.62

What began as a shrewd business strategy—to pirate a Japanese-made Japanese typewriter in order to compete with Japanese-made Chinese typewriters—took an unforeseen and precarious turn for Yu Binqi beginning in the early 1930s. Following the Japanese invasion of northeast China and the bombardment of Shanghai, Yu Binqi became increasingly reluctant to speak to people outside the family about his typewriting enterprise. As his son recalled, guests to the Yu family home were steered clear of the workshop, his father being aware of acute and growing anti-Japanese sentiment in the city. With widespread calls to boycott Japanese goods, any revelation of Yu’s secret—that his work was but a retrofitted H-style Japanese machine—could have easily brought undesired attention.

And indeed it did. In 1931, an unnamed informant alerted editors at the widely distributed newspaper Shenbao to the questionable origins of Yu Binqi’s ostensibly Chinese machine. Flagged as well were the political affiliations of the entrepreneur himself. Although designated a “domestic” product, the informant suggested, Yu Binqi’s machine may even have involved secret “collusion” with Japanese merchants.63 Such an accusation was certain to raise alarms. With the launch of the “Resist Japan, Save the Nation” movement, nationalist consumers had already begun boycotting Japanese products, ranging from fish to coal. The day following the accusation in Shenbao, Yu Binqi responded in his own defense. Presenting receipts to the Resist Japan Association, Yu swore that he would willingly die if anyone could prove that he had purchased raw materials from Japan, or had sought out Japanese workers.64 On November 11, the Standing Committee of the Resist Japan Association met at the offices of the Shanghai Chamber of Commerce to discuss the claims leveled against Yu Binqi, as well as his rebuttal.65

January 1932 brought a measure of relief for Yu. Shenbao reported that the claims made against him were false, that his typewriter had been patented by the Chinese government in 1930, and that it was a domestic product of high quality that had since been adopted by banks, post offices, and other government institutions.66 While it remains uncertain how Yu Binqi managed to secure this positive and definitive response from the paper, Yu squandered no time in cementing his patriotic credentials. In the fall of 1932, he announced his latest technical improvement for the machine, as well as his latest contribution to the causes of domestic Chinese production and resisting Japanese imports: steel character slugs that would replace the lead type on his current typewriter model. Invented in the United States, a September report in Shenbao relayed, this new technology was first applied to Chinese typewriters by Japanese, rather than Chinese, inventors. In the process, Japanese merchants had secured large profits, with these more durable and lighter steel slugs producing crisper text. Yu Binqi brought this new technology home, nationalizing it and thus offering Chinese consumers a means of further “resisting” Japanese imports.67 In the same year, and in the midst of the refugee crisis in China’s northeast, the Yu-style Chinese typewriter would be offered at a 10 percent discount, with thirty yuan donated to the northeastern provinces for each unit sold.68 The company later accelerated the donation process, promising to donate the full thirty yuan on the customer’s behalf with only a thirty yuan down payment on a new machine.69 In the years to follow, Yu continued to donate to national causes, particularly those involving humanitarian crises and natural disasters. In 1935, his company pledged twenty-five yuan to Chinese flood victims for every machine sold between December and the following February.70

The strategy paid off, and at a time when Yu needed it most. In the summer of 1933, Yu Binqi appeared to be running short on capital, prompting him to seek collaborations with other Chinese entrepreneurs and factory directors. He made known his desire either to acquire domestic capital support somewhere in the range of ten to twenty thousand yuan, or perhaps to sell his typewriter patent to another domestic inventor. Yu’s call was answered the following year, with five Shanghai-based factories joining in the manufacture of Yu-style machines.71 By the fall of 1934, Shenbao ran articles on Yu referring to his impact as a “revolution” in Chinese typewriting.72 By the close of 1934, the Hongye Company—the national sales agency Yu Binqi worked with—reported selling an average of forty Yu-style machines each month, a figure no doubt helped by Hongye’s offer of free training to consumers.73 Shenbao later reported on Yu’s successful development of wax duplicating paper, which could be used instead of carbon paper to create upward of one thousand clear copies, when paired with proto-mimeograph machines.74 In 1936, Shenbao went so far as to call Yu’s machine “Five Times More Convenient Than Writing and Copying by Hand.”75

Paperwork of Empire: Japanese Typists on the Chinese Mainland

By the winter and spring of 1937, it must have seemed to Yu Binqi that he had finally sanitized the technological history of his machine and fortified his own patriotic credentials beyond dispute. In February, Yu was elected president at the Preparatory Meeting of the Chinese Inventors Association—the very association he had a hand in founding (again in true Shanghai entrepreneurial style).76 He had even found a way to enlist his first passion—athletics—in the service of shoring up his reputation, organizing a Ping-Pong match with fellow table tennis players to raise funds in support of crisis-ridden Suiyuan province.77

With the passage of only a few short months, however, everything changed. In July 1937, Japan launched a full-scale invasion of eastern China, unleashing a war that would claim between twenty and twenty-five million lives before its conclusion eight years later. With the fall of Shanghai in November and Nanjing in December, the Chinese Nationalist government retreated to the tri-city complex of Wuhan. Following a brutal and costly campaign for the protection of Wuhan, the city fell in October 1938, forcing the Nationalist government to retreat once again, this time to the city of Chongqing deep in the interior of China.

In the wake of the invasion, Japan took control of ever-larger swaths of China’s information infrastructure. This was true not only for the manufacture and sale of Chinese typewriters but indeed for all typewriter models, Western, Chinese, or otherwise. Import statistics from the time period paint a stark picture, charting a trajectory of increasing and soon total domination by Japanese businesses. From 1932 until the close of 1937, the United States had dwarfed all other countries as the leading exporter of typewriters and typewriter parts to China, fulfilling demands for English-language machines by the foreign merchant community, and by English-speaking staffs of foreign concessions. During this same period, Germany ranked a distant second, primarily on the strength of the country’s precision engineering. In 1937, this long-established economic pattern began to transform. In the span of just one year, Japan’s share of the typewriter import market rocketed, siphoning away market share from the United States each year from the close of 1937 until the beginning of 1941. Following its declaration of war against the United States in 1941, and its simultaneous military occupation of Southeast Asia, Japan achieved near total control over the flow of foreign machines into the Chinese market. American typewriter exports to China plummeted to practically nothing (figure 5.5).78

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5.5 Typewriter and typewriter part imports to China, 1932–1942

Domination of the Western typewriter import market was but one piece of Japan’s emerging hegemony over China’s information infrastructure. In the fields of telegraphy and telecommunications, as Daqing Yang has shown, Japan constructed a robust telecommunications network enabling “an unprecedented degree of administrative centralization and imperial market integration.”79 By 1940, within a few short years of the invasion, Japan was exchanging on the order of twelve million telegrams with parties in occupied China, Manchukuo, and its colonies—a figure ten times larger than the country’s combined telegraphic communication with the rest of the world.80

China became a vast market for Japanese-language kanji machines, with sales propelled by the bureaucratic demands of empire. Particularly from the fall of 1938 through 1942, during which time Japan shifted from primarily extractive policies toward the attempted creation of a stable colonial regime, tales of patriotic Japanese typists—or aikoku taipisuto—began to appear in the Japanese press.81 On January 4, 1938, readers of the Tokyo Asahi shinbun learned of the “Six Patriotic Women” and their arrival in Tianjin, with regular reports coming in as the year unfolded. In 1939, the newspaper followed up with related news of a young typist headed to the South Seas, also in service of her country.82 Where the Japanese army went, so went these brave young Japanese women, reports explained, risking personal safety to oversee the paperwork of conquest. In the fall issue of Taipisuto, one contributor reminisced about her classmate from the Yamagata Girls’ Professional School who departed Japan for the Asian continent. Oba Sachiko was her name, and on September 25, 1941, she would be heading off, but not before being toasted at a bittersweet farewell party attended by the head of their division. “I will work very hard!” Oba had exclaimed in terse but potent words. It was a pity to see her go, the author lamented, being such a well-trained and mature typist—and yet it left her with a sense of pride that this classmate would be sacrificing so much in support of the imperial war effort.83

The self-sacrificing allure of the patriotic typist achieved perhaps unprecedented notoriety with the 1941 publication of The Army Typist (Jūgun taipisuto), a novella by Sakurada Tsunehisa (1897–1990) that narrated the tale of a young typist who accompanied Japanese soldiers to Zhangjiakou at the tender age of nineteen.84 Giving up the security of the Japanese metropole, she committed herself to bearing the perils of Mongolia.85 In another series featured in Taipisuto, a Japanese officer charted his pathway through south China, reveling in his admiration of a Japanese typewriting agency he encountered in an undisclosed location. Coming upon the outfit, he reported, his ears echoed with the nostalgic sound of Japanese typewriting, symbolizing the burgeoning of a new mainland government and the construction of Greater East Asia.86

Japanese typing schools were founded in urban centers throughout the mainland occupation zone, Manchukuo, and Taiwan. As one report in Taipisuto relayed, by 1941 there was hardly a single company of any size in Taiwan that operated without a Japanese typist, a “typist fever” (taipisuto netsu) fed by an annual influx of some five hundred new typing personnel, trained in secondary schools, girls’ schools, or institutes associated with the Japanese typewriter company itself. Indeed, the head of the Taibei branch of the Nippon Typewriter Company made known his ambition to have their typewriter “enter every household … just like in Europe and America.”87

Same Script, Same Race, Same Typewriter: The Wartime Origins of CJK

Japanese imperial expansion was undoubtedly a boon to Japanese typewriter sales. The Japanese-language market paled in comparison, however, to the one that the Nippon Typewriter Company and others stood to gain by investing in the Chinese information technology market—a program they undertook aggressively during the war. By 1942, the company could boast of extensive coverage in China. The company had divisions in Dalian, Xinjing, Fengtian, Anshan, Harbin, Jilin, Jinzhou, Qiqihaer, Shanghai, Beijing, Tianjin, Jinan, Nanjing, Zhangjiakou, Houhe, Taiyuan, Hankou, Jingcheng, and Taibei.88 Further supported by its divisions in Japan, in cities such as Osaka, Nagoya, Sapporo, Sendai, Niigata, Kanazawa, Shizuoka, Hakodate, Ogura, and Fukui, the Nippon Typewriter Company had taken its place as one of the most important typewriter manufacturers in the world. It had achieved what Remington, Underwood, Olympia, Olivetti, and Mergenthaler Linotype had all failed to achieve, moreover: entrance into, and what is more, domination of, the Chinese-language market. For Commercial Press and Yu Binqi, the decline in market share would have been precipitous.

The flagship machine in Japan’s domination of the Chinese market was the Bannō, Wanneng, or “All-Purpose” typewriter, built by the Nippon Typewriter Company. Displayed in a 1940 advertisement from the Far East Trade Monthly, its verbose yet revealing moniker was the “Japanese, Manchu, Chinese, Mongolian All-Script Typewriter,” marking this device as the very materialization of Japan’s “Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere,” and its colonial refrains of ethnic harmony and “same script, same race” (dōbun dōshū) (figure 5.6).89 It also marked the first time that a Japanese manufacturer had oriented its machines not only toward the character-based scripts of East Asia, but also the alphabetic scripts of Manchu and Mongolian. The machine quickly became enmeshed within galas spotlighting the ethnic harmony of Manchukuo, including a 1941 “Manchuria-Wide Typing Competition” that brought together typists from the cities of Xinjing, Dalian, Fengtian, Anshan, Benxihu, Mudan­jiang, and Harbin.90

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5.6 Advertisement for Japanese-made “All-Purpose” typewriter (with Japanese, Manchu, Chinese, and Mongolian)

All of this had a deleterious effect on Chinese manufacturers. Wanneng became the machine of choice and compulsion in China. It quickly displaced both the Shu-style Chinese typewriter manufactured by Commercial Press and the Yu Binqi model. Commercial Press attempted to mount a response with the release of its improved Shu-style machine, featuring a larger platen, the use of an ink ball instead of an ink ribbon, and adjustable print-spacing better suited to alternating between Chinese and Western scripts.91 Despite such efforts, however, Commercial Press could not compete. As for Yu Binqi, his once celebrated outfit became but a shell of its prior self. While still called a “manufacturing” plant, Yu’s factory had neither the capital nor the market to continue building or selling typewriters. Instead, the plant eked out an existence by carrying out small-scale repairs, offering typing services, and melting down metal type.92 As for Yu himself, he seems to have taken refuge in the world of athletics, appearing in sporadic newspaper reports over the course of the war in connection with various sporting competitions and newly formed athletic organizations. Whether he was granting medals at the Shanghai Ping-Pong competition in 1943, or serving as chief timekeeper at the 39th Japanese Navy track and field competition in May 1944, Yu’s life had changed remarkably, as did those of countless others during the war.93

On Complicity and Opportunity: Chinese Typists under Japanese Occupation

Without manufacturing alternatives of their own, Chinese typewriter companies had little choice other than to collaborate. As Parks Coble and Timothy Brook have shown, Chinese capitalists operating under Japanese control were less riveted by concerns of patriotism and resistance, and more by the survival of their family operations. Rare were the cases that matched the “heroic nationalist narrative” celebrated in postwar Chinese histories of the era.94 Only a minority of Chinese capitalists fled Japanese-occupied territories and relocated westward in the path of the Nationalist government-in-exile. The majority who remained, collaborators and non-collaborators alike, worried deeply about rebuilding China’s ruined economy, reconstructing the industrial and agricultural sectors, and repairing the country’s tax system.95

For those in the business of Chinese typewriters in particular, this translated into a variety of economic activities through which to subsist and survive. For example, Chinese typewriters continued to require cleaning during the occupation, services provided by companies such as the C.Y. Chao Typewriting Maintenance Department.96 Captured within the complicities of the era—Timothy Brook’s apt choice of words encapsulating the entanglements between Japanese occupiers, Chinese collaborators, Chinese non-collaborators, and outright resisters—Chinese companies and businessmen serviced the Sino-Japanese clerical world throughout the war, whether the Huanqiu Chinese Typewriter Manufacturing Company, the Chang Yah Kee Typewriter Company, or the Ming Kee Typewriter Company, among many others.97

Facing a shifting political and linguistic context, meanwhile, Chinese typewriter manufacturers stole a page from the Nippon Typewriter Company playbook and began to emphasize the linguistic ambidexterity of their own machines. China Standard Typewriter Manufacturing Company offered a selection of bilingual machines, such as its “Standard Horizontal-Vertical-style Chinese-Japanese typewriter.” The capacity to handle both Chinese and Japanese became a selling point of the utmost importance, not only because of the growing Japanese-language bureaucracy, but also to stem the tide of a new threat faced by Chinese companies: Japanese kanji typewriters being retrofitted to handle Chinese, simply by emptying their tray bed matrices and re-outfitting them with Chinese-character slugs.98 In August 1943, the director of public works in Shanghai received requests for funds to purchase two Chinese machines. While permitting the allocation, the office of the treasurer added: “It should also not be overlooked that these Japanese typewriters could also be used for correspondence in Chinese.”99 In a separate request for additional Chinese typewriters, the response likewise emphasized the potential of converting Japanese machines: “Two Japanese typewriters in the General Affairs Department can also be used to type Chinese after some changes are made in the types. These three typewriters may serve the purpose for the time being.”100

The complex wartime-era complicities and opportunities were particularly pronounced in the classroom. Chinese typing institutes proliferated during the occupation, sites in which groups of Chinese instructors trained increasing numbers of Chinese students to form a clerical workforce versed in the new technology. At one level, these institutes were spaces of opportunity, possibility, and social mobility—spaces in which young women and men gathered and, in a relatively short span of time and at costs more attainable than extensive formal education, attempted to position themselves for white-collar employment.

The cultures of these small-scale occupation-era institutes are challenging to re-create from available source materials, and yet evidentiary glimpses offer us certain interpretive possibilities. What the archival record bears out is that each of the many typing institutes operating during the war needs to be understood as an intimate and even exciting place in which young Chinese women and men mixed, and where many committed themselves to exercising some small measure of control over their own futures and livelihoods within the confines of this chaotic, destructive period. In Beijing, for example, the Guangde Chinese Typewriting Supplementary School was founded circa 1938, the year following the outbreak of war. Overseen by twenty-seven-year-old Anfeng county native and Art Institute of National Beiping University graduate Wei Geng, one cohort of students in 1938 comprised seventeen young women and thirteen young men. Female members of the class ranged in age from sixteen to twenty-seven, with a median age of nineteen. Whereas the majority of female students boasted a middle-school education, the spectrum varied widely: from those with no more than a lower-school education, to one lone graduate of the French Catholic Yu Chen Women’s Normal School, founded in 1817 in the present-day Xicheng district of the city.101 As for the thirteen men who joined this same 1938 cohort, they were spread across a similar age spectrum, and with similar educational backgrounds. Ranging from seventeen to twenty, most of the male students in this class arrived with a middle-school education, flanked by a handful of participants with lesser or greater educational background.102

It was not uncommon for students to continue their studies for more than one year—well beyond the typical three-month timeframe—suggestive of a practice and a strategy geared toward weathering the economic uncertainties of the era, or perhaps developing a sense of continuity in an otherwise chaotic time. In the Jiyang Chinese Typewriting Supplementary School, also in Beijing, one cohort in 1937 comprised eight female and four male students. These two groups ranged widely in terms of age, with female members of the class ranging from seventeen to twenty-seven and male students ranging from eighteen to twenty-eight. Both groups of students exhibited identical educational backgrounds, with all but one student boasting a middle-school education. Upon concluding their training in 1937, all but one member of this cohort reenrolled in the class in 1938, joined by seventeen new students. While their motivations fall well beyond our grasp, nevertheless the timing of this collective continuation prompts us to consider whether professional schools such as Jiyang offered refuge in this tumultuous period in the immediate wake of the Japanese invasion, as well as perhaps a way of maintaining a sense of continued professional identity.103 Whether they were motivated by these or other factors, nevertheless it is striking to contemplate what bonds must have formed between these eleven continuing students when they reconvened one year later.

At the same time, each of these Chinese institutes also constituted a politically compromised site. Students trained on Japanese-built machines. They worked under the guidance of instructors with greater and lesser ties to Japan. And in the most optimistic of scenarios, they aspired to find employment in the collaborationist government, or in a private sector itself permeated by Japanese interests. At the Guangde school in Beijing, students trained on one of two Japanese-built Chinese typewriters: the Wanneng-style Chinese typewriter, or the Standard-style Japanese typewriter.104 At the East Asia Japanese-Chinese Typewriting Professional Supplementary School, founded by thirty-eight-year-old Sheng Yaozhang no later than December 1938, students likewise trained on one of four Japanese-built Chinese machines: the Suganuma-style Chinese typewriter, the Wanneng-style Chinese typewriter, the Horizontal-style Chinese typewriter, or the Standard-style Chinese typewriter.105 Meanwhile, students at the Jiyang Chinese Typewriting Supplementary School in Beijing also worked exclusively with Japanese equipment, studying the Chinese Typewriting Textbook published by the Nippon Typewriter Company for use with the company’s Japanese-built Chinese machines.106

Like the textbooks and apparatuses used in such schools, teaching staff also had direct and indirect connections to Japan. At the Yucai Chinese Typing School, for example, twenty-seven-year-old principal and Shao­xing native Zhou Yaru was herself a graduate of the East Asia Japanese-Chinese Typing School, and a former typist at Nippon-China Trade, Ltd.107 In the Xizhimen district of Beijing, twenty-three-year-old Li Youtang oversaw the Baoshan Chinese Typewriting Supplementary School, formed sometime around October 1938. As a graduate of the Tenrikyō School in Japan, Li returned to Beijing to teach at the Beijing Japanese Tenrikyō Association. Shortly thereafter, he teamed up with an associate, surnamed Li, who like him had also come up through Japanese educational circles, graduating from a Japanese language school.108 Together, the two formed Baoshan one year after the outbreak of full-scale war.

Bringing this history full circle, as it were, was the East Asia Japanese-Chinese Typewriting Supplementary School and its founder Sheng Yaozhang. Hailing from Lianyang county in Fengtian province, Sheng was himself a graduate of the Fengtian Japanese-Chinese Typing Institute, part of the same network encountered above, where in 1932 the instructor Li Xianyan first set down on paper his apology for clerical collaborationism.109 Scarcely could Li have known the full meaning his statement would ultimately take on: typists more than anyone must follow the times.

By 1940, Chinese typewriting had entered a period marked by deep contradictions. As an object and a commodity, the Chinese typewriter itself was thriving, backed by a more formidable manufacturing and marketing network than ever before. As a symbol of modernity, the status of the machine had never before reached such heights, its identity as a technolinguistic advance becoming stabilized, at least in China, for arguably the first time in its history. The ends to which this symbol of technolinguistic modernity were now put, however, diverged sharply from those first imagined by Zhou Houkun, Qi Xuan, Shu Zhendong, and the executives at Commercial Press. This thriving network was created and managed by Japanese multinationals, calling into question the ostensibly Chinese identity of the machine. This symbol had now become enrolled into—perhaps even aligned with—the violence-laden ambitions of Japan’s multinational, multilingual empire.

Copying Japan to Save China: The Double Pigeon Machine

The summer of 1945 witnessed the horrific and precipitous conclusion of the Second World War. With Japanese urban areas now within range of Allied bombers, the winter and spring months witnessed large-scale saturation bombings of metropolitan areas, including the devastating March firebombing of Tokyo. Over the course of the two-day attack, the Allied firebombing resulted in the deaths of an estimated one hundred thousand people. In May, the fall of Berlin and the Nazi surrender precipitated the denouement of the European conflict, freeing the Soviet Union and Allied forces to concentrate attention more fully on the Pacific theater. On August 6, the United States released the first of two atomic bombs, obliterating the city of Hiroshima and killing somewhere in the order of 90,000 to 160,000 inhabitants. Two days later, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan, opening up a new and dangerous front for the beleaguered Japanese Imperial Army. This was followed on August 9 by the second atomic attack—this time against the city of Nagasaki. On August 15, Japan announced unconditional surrender.

The surrender of Japanese forces precipitated a massive repatriation process that, as Lori Watt has examined, would see nearly seven million Japanese nationals leave China, Manchukuo, and the former colonies.110 On the Chinese mainland, the communities and economies they had once occupied, and now left behind, were devastated. The Eight-Year War of Resistance Against Japan, as it would come to be known, left behind a Chinese economy in shambles.

Only in the immediate postwar period were Chinese typewriter manufacturers able to regain control of the market. Even this “recovery,” however, was far from a straightforward story. In the wake of the Second World War, what had once been the strategy of the lone, debonair athlete-turned-inventor Yu Binqi soon became the collective strategy of the entire Chinese typewriting industry. One by one, Chinese businessmen who had once struggled against the Wanneng-style machine simply began to copy it or sell it directly—all while quietly omitting its Japanese past. Many of these copycat efforts were undertaken by Chinese businessmen who had come of age under Yu Binqi, perhaps in fact inspired by his example. In the late 1940s, Yu’s former employee Chen Changgeng resurfaced to open his own typewriter manufacturing plant. Based in Shanghai, this plant would sell the “People’s Welfare Typewriter” (Min­sheng daziji)—the company name lifted directly from the pages of Sun Yat-sen’s “Three People’s Principles.” On the cover of Chen’s typing manual, however, the apparatus shown was none other than the Japanese-built Wanneng machine. Perhaps having removed the faceplate reading “Nippon Typewriter Company,” supplanting it with one reading “Minsheng,” Chen’s enterprise was nevertheless premised on the postwar seizure of Japanese typewriter manufacturing and its repackaging as a domestic Chinese product. Yu Binqi had taught Chen well (figure 5.7).111

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5.7 The “People’s Welfare Typewriter”—a Wanneng duplicate

Chen Changgeng was not the only entrepreneur to stake his postwar fortunes on the seizure and Sinicization of the Wanneng machine. In 1949, yet another associate in Yu Binqi’s network began to traffic in what he called the “Mr. Fan Wanneng Chinese Typewriter.” Fan Jiling, himself a graduate of the Yu Binqi training institute many years earlier, did not attempt to change the name of the machine, and yet he wrote about Wanneng in words that avoided mention of its wartime, Japanese origins.112 “Ever since the promotion of the Wanneng-style Chinese typewriter,” Fan explained in his textbook, “its superior design and manufacture led it to become common everywhere in a matter of a few years, with users singing its praises. Other styles of machine, with their clumsy shapes, gradually became obsolete.”

The most effective copycat of all, however, was the newly formed Chinese Communist regime itself, which began to seize Japanese typewriting interests within a few short years of the 1949 revolution and convert them into Chinese-owned enterprises. In 1951, the Tianjin Public Industry Authority took control of the Japanese Typewriter Company, reorganizing it as the Red Star Typewriter Company—a name that, like “People’s Welfare” before it, was ideologically appropriate and properly patriotic.

Even with the widespread seizure and nationalization of Japanese outfits, and steep limitations placed on imported machines, the Chinese state and business community could not fully stem the tide of Japanese influence in the domestic typewriter market. In Tianjin, the primary focus of the newly nationalized Red Star Typewriter Company remained the import of Japanese-made typewriters and calculators from Japan. In 1951, by one estimate, more than 4,000 typewriters and calculators were imported, mainly from Japan. “If import statistics from around the country are tallied,” the report read, “the loss to the national economy is indeed staggering.”113 “For those of us in the typewriter manufacturing industry, here upon the people’s stage of the motherland, this has caused us immeasurable anguish and humiliation.”114

Beginning in the 1950s, the domestic Chinese typewriter industry partnered with the new regime to mount a coordinated response to Japanese market dominance, consolidating the highly diverse and fragmented network of Chinese companies into larger conglomerates.115 Ten separate Chinese typewriter companies set out to form what would be known as the Shanghai Chinese Typewriter Manufacturers Association. Han Zonghai of the Yu-Style Chinese Typewriter Company, Tao Minzhi of the Wenhua Chinese Typewriter Company, Tong Lisheng of the Jingyi Typewriter Company, Hu Zhixiang of the China Typewriter Company, Chen Changgeng of the Minsheng Chinese Typewriter Company, and other associates convened to determine how the merger would take place.116 Headquartered at 7 Tianjin Road, the consortium would be directed by Han Zonghai, Li Zhaofeng, and Hu Zhixiang.117 It was this consortium that would go on to build what would become the emblematic typewriter of the People’s Republic: the Double Pigeon Chinese typewriter.

In developing the Double Pigeon, the Shanghai Calculator and Typewriter Company would apply the same policy of imitation, or fangzhi, as Yu Binqi, Chen Changgeng, Fan Jiling, and others—only this time, they would do so on a national scale and with the backing of the Chinese state. The designers of Double Pigeon explicitly based this machine upon the Japanese-made Wanneng machine.118 Three phases marked the development of the Double Pigeon machine. From July to November 1962, the team fashioned and tested four prototypes. From July to November 1963, it repeated this process for an additional forty machines. From January to March 1964, the team made further revisions to the machine, then subjected the resulting modified prototypes to further testing.119 On March 25, 1964, the resulting machine was presented at a conference to a group of company representatives, including those from the Shanghai Machinery Import-Export Company and the Shanghai Typewriter market (figure 5.8).120 “The Double Pigeon DHY-model Chinese typewriter,” internal reports explained in blunt terms, “is an alteration of the Wanneng-style Chinese Typewriter.”121

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5.8 The Double Pigeon Chinese typewriter

Like others before them, the Shanghai Calculator and Typewriter Factory and its state patrons soon quietly forgot the Japanese origins of their Chinese machine, and the broader history of Japan’s wartime domination of Chinese information technology. Instead, the Japanese-built Wanneng Chinese typewriter was reconfigured and quietly resurrected as the Chinese-built Double Pigeon machine.

Thinking back to Evelyn Tai and the day she purchased her typewriter at the shop in Singapore, it turns out that the choice she made—between the Japanese-built Superwriter and the Chinese-built Double Pigeon—was far less stark than I had originally imagined. The history of East Asian information technology during the first half of the twentieth century—and particularly from the 1920s through the 1960s—blurred the lines that otherwise might have demarcated our story into easily discernible national categories. The Superwriter was a Japanese-built apparatus, to be sure, and yet the linguistic and mechanical principles underlying its design, as well as the motivations propelling its development, were inseparable from the deeper history of Chinese typewriting we have examined thus far.

As for the Double Pigeon machine, the lines were hazy as well. Although it had been built by a consortium of Chinese manufacturers, businesspeople, and state authorities, and although it was to become the iconic typewriter of the Maoist period, the history of this machine was itself inseparable from the history of Japanese occupation, the Japanese seizure of China’s domestic typewriter market, and Wanneng. For my own part, I quickly realized that the pale green machine that sat atop my dresser at home—ostensibly the most Chinese of all Chinese typewriters—would never again look quite the same.

The Double Pigeon will play a central role in the story to come in mainland China, when we witness how Mao-era typists reimagined it and other typewriters in ways that engineers had not anticipated nor even believed possible. But first we cross the ocean to the United States one last time, to investigate experiments being undertaken in the Manhattan studio of bestselling author, linguist, cultural ambassador, and typewriter inventor Lin Yutang. These experiments, as we will see, would transform the history of modern Chinese information technology forever, giving rise to an entirely new relationship between humans, machines, and language.

Notes