DIJ History & Humanities / Business and Economics Joint Study Group, 27 February 2013, 6.30pm
Organizers: Kristina Iwata-Weickgenannt, Susanne Klien, Florian Kohlbacher, Tim Tiefenbach

We would like to invite you to our next study group at the German Institute for Japanese Studies (DIJ), Tokyo.

This month's speaker will be
Raja Adal, University of Tokyo
who will give a presentation entitled

The Invisible Hand of the Writer: The Advent of the Japanese Typewriter and the Anonymity of Information Exchange in Japanese Corporations

With the rise of corporate capitalism in 1910s Japan, a growing number of co mpany employees began to entertain impersonal relationships with the managem ent of increasingly large firms. The company came to be compared less to a f amily and more to a giant machine in which information circulated up, down, and across managerial hierarchies. In 1916, Japanese corporations began to w rite office documents using a new
instrument: the Japanese typewriter. Altho ugh the Japanese typewriter featured more than 2300 keys and was notoriously impractical, it was a commercial success selling more than twenty-thousand machines within a few years. This paper asks why the Japanese typewriter was so successful. It argues that a crucial aspect of the Japanese typewriter'
s appeal was its ability to facilitate a more impersonal circulation of info rmation. With its uniform and anonymous script, the typewriter hid the gende r, class, and education of the writer, leading, among other things, to women'
s entrance into the workforce. Through research in the press, in teaching ma nuals, in the archives of Mitsui Company, and of the Japan Typewriter Compan y, among others, this paper will explore the relationship between the forms of information exchange required by a nascent corporate capitalism and the a nonymity which the typewriter gave to this circulated information.

Raja Adal is currently a JSPS Research Fellow at the University of Tokyo Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies. He received his Ph.D. in History from Harvard University and in August
2013 will become assistant professor at the University of Cincinnati. He is currently completing a manuscript on education, aesthetics, and nationalism in Japan and Egypt. His other project is a global history of the typewriter outside of the world of Latin characters.

The presentation will be given in English. Admission is free. The DIJ Study Groups are a forum for young scholars and Ph.D. candidates in pertaining fields.
Everybody is welcome to attend, but kindly asked to register with Susanne Klien: klien@dijtokyo.org

German Institute for Japanese Studies (DIJ) Jochi Kioizaka Bldg. 2F, 7-1 Kioicho, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo
102-0094
Phone: 03-3222-5077 Fax: 03-3222-5420
www.dijtokyo.org