The Chinese Typewriter

by Thomas Mullaney

  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

  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 Chine
se 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

  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

  1 Email communication, James Yee, July 6, 2009.

  2 The London visit was precipitated by another email message. “Sorry if this is not of interest,” it began. “My mum has a chinese typewriter and is about to scrap it as we have not been able to find a home for it. It is a Superwriter315SR with several trays of characters—still in working order.” The family was remodeling the floors of their home, I would later learn, prompting them to inventory and purge some of their belongings. With great reluctance, the mother of the household had agreed to part with her beloved machine. She entrusted her daughter, Maria, to find it a new home. “It seems a waste to throw it out,” the email continued. “Mum used to use it all the time and was pretty fast.” Email from Maria Tai to the author, May 14, 2010. Names have been changed.

  3 Sherry Turkle, ed., Evocative Objects: Things We Think With (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007).

  4 “CJK” is sometimes extended into “CJKV,” to include Vietnamese. See Ken Lunde, CJKV Information Processing: Chinese, Japanese, Korean & Vietnamese Computing (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 2009).

  5 Ryōshin Minami, “Mechanical Power and Printing Technology in Pre–World War II Japan,” Technology and Culture 23, no. 4 (1982): 609–624; Daqing Yang, “Telecommunication and the Japanese Empire: A Preliminary Analysis of Telegraphic Traffic,” Historical Social Research 35, no. 1 (2010): 68–69; Miyako Inoue, “Stenography and Ventriloquism in Late Nineteenth Century Japan,” Language and Communication 31 (2011): 181–190; Patricia L. Maclachlan, The People’s Post Office: The History and Politics of the Japanese Postal System, 1871–2010 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Asia Center, 2012); Seth Jacobowitz, Writing Technology in Meiji Japan: A Media History of Modern Japanese Literature and Visual Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Asia Center, 2015).

  6 Ryōshin Minami, “Mechanical Power and Printing Technology in Pre–World War II Japan,” 609–624.

  7 In Tokyo and Osaka, the five largest newspaper outfits nearly quintupled in annual circulation between 1881 and 1891, from approximately twelve to fifty million subscribers. This figure more than doubled between 1891 and 1901, reaching a combined annual circulation of 119,368,000 for Tokyo Asahi, Tokyo Nichinichi, Yomiuri, Ōsaka Asahi, and Ōsaka Mainichi. This represents an annual rate of growth of 32.9 percent from 1881 to 1891 and 13.4 percent from 1891 to 1901. Unlike their counterpart publishers in the United Kingdom and the United States, moreover, sectors of the Japanese publishing industry leapfrogged steam power altogether, moving directly from manual labor to the electrification of rotary presses. The Tokyo Asahi, for example, moved directly to electrification, taking advantage of a technology that had only recently been introduced in Western contexts. Ryōshin Minami, “Mechanical Power and Printing Technology in Pre–World War II Japan,” 617–619.

  8 Yang, “Telecommunication and the Japanese Empire,” 68–69.

  9 “Denshin jigō [電信字号],” “Extension Selskabet—Japansk Telegrafnøgle,” 1871. Arkiv nr. 10.619. In “Love og vedtægter med anordninger,” GN Store Nord A/S SN China and Japan Extension Telegraf. Rigsarkivet [Danish National Archives], Copenhagen, Denmark.

  10 Yang, “Telecommunication and the Japanese Empire,” 68–69.

  11 Andre Schmid, Korea between Empires (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 57–59.

  12 Ibid., 67–69.

  13 Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (New York: Verso, 1991).

  14 In one of the many ironies of the era, Hwangsong sinmun in many ways led the charge in the critique of character-based script, and yet did not feature a single editorial written in the Korean vernacular during its thirteen years of publication. See Schmid, Korea between Empires, 17.

  15 Proposal for the Abolition of Chinese Characters (Kanji gohaishi no gi) [漢字ご廃止の議]; Seeley, A History of Writing in Japan, 138–139.

  16 “Hiragana no setsu” [平仮名の説] (On Hiragana); Seeley, A History of Writing in Japan, 139.

  17 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), 6–7. The choice of the term taipuraitā here is important, with Kurosawa adopting the phoneticized loan word rather than a translation into kanji characters. My thanks to Joshua Fogel for alerting me to the importance of this point.

  18 Dave Sheridan, Memo to Sales Staff regarding Remington Japanese Typewriter, Hagley Museum and Library, accession 1825, Remington Rand Corporation, R
ecords of the Advertising and Sales Promotion Department, Series I Typewriter Div. Subseries B Remington Typewriter Company, box 3, folder 6, “Keyboards and Typestyles—Correspondence, 1906.”

  19 Teishin Ministry Electricity Bureau (Teishin-shō denmu kyoku) [遞信省電務局], ed., Japanese Typewriting (Wabun taipuraichingu) [和文タイプライチング] (Tokyo: Teishin kyōkai, 1941), 25–27, 43.

  20 Kamo Masakazu [加茂正一], Taipuraitā no chishiki to renshū タイプライターの知識と練習 (Tokyo: Bunyūdō Shoten [文友堂書店], 1923), front matter. For a wonderful compendium of typewriter art in the west, see Barrie Tullet, Typewriter Art: A Modern Anthology (London: Laurence King Publishers, 2014).

  21 Sheridan, Memo to Sales Staff regarding Remington Japanese Typewriter.

  22 Sukeshige Yanagiwara, “Type-writing Machine,” United States Patent no. 1206072 (filed February 1, 1915; patented November 28, 1916). Assignor to Underwood Typewriter Company; Burnham Stickney, “Typewriting Machine,” United States Patent no. 1549622 (filed February 9, 1923; patented August 11, 1925).

  23 1915 Tsugi Kitahara postcard, author’s collection. Similarly, in response to the Underwood patent by Burnham Stickney, Remington tasked its senior keyboard designer Robert McKean Jones to the katakana project—the company’s “master typographer,” whom we encountered in chapter 4. See Robert McKean Jones, “Typewriting Machine,” United States Patent no. 1687939 (filed May 19, 1927; patented October 16, 1928).