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
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 f
ailed 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
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
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