The Chinese Typewriter

by Thomas Mullaney

  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 tr
aced 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

  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

&nb
sp; 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