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, jou
rnalist, 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
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
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.
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 t
echnolinguistic 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 hanzi—Japan, 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:
The Chinese Typewriter Page 29
