The next meeting of the Japan History Group (JHG) at the Institute of Social Science (ISS), University of Tokyo, will be held on Thursday, 19 January 2016 at
6:00 PM in Centre Meeting Room No.549 (Centre Kaigi-shitsu), 5th floor of the Akamon Research Building, Hongo Campus.

Presenter: Raja Adal (Assistant Professor, Department of History, Pittsburgh University)

Title: The Age of the Typewriter: Writing, Aesthetics, and the Children of the Guttenberg Revolution

Discussant: Kenji Sato (Professor, Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology, the University of Tokyo)

Abstract:
The typewriter caused a revolution in the speed and efficiency of writing in the Western world, but it had considerable difficulty adapting to non-Latin scripts.
The first Japanese typewriter in 1915 had 3100 keys, which made it not only slower than handwriting but heavy, expensive, and tiring to use. Despite these disadvantages, it was a commercial success, selling tens of thousands of machines in the 1920s and 1930s, employing an equal number of typists, and becoming a mainstay in the offices of large companies, government bureaucracies, and schools. My research asks why such an inefficient machine was so popular.

My work hypothesizes that anonymity was key to the typewriter's global success. Although the Japanese typewriter was not efficient in the sense of making it possible to write faster than with a brush or a pen, it was one of the technologies advocated by Japanese proponents of Taylorism because it made handwritten documents into highly legible and uniform typewritten documents that revolutionized both labor relations and information management. The typewriter transformed labor relations by separating the hand from the word, masking individual attributes like gender from the reader, and making it possible for female typists to replace male scribes. Furthermore, by virtualizing the relationship between the hand and the word, the typewriter transformed the nature of communication.
Handwriting was harder to read because it left behind a trace of the hand of the writer, of their gender, educational level, or physical fatigue. Typewriting stripped writing of this trace and, in so doing, made it more legible but also more malleable as a bit of data. In this sense, the typewriter helped create what Martin Heidegger has referred to as a "standing reserve," namely a database of texts that could easily be stored, transmitted, and retrieved. My project uses the history of the typewriter to both take us to the prehistory of the database and bring us back to handwriting as a form of thick expression that leaves a sediment of the body dispersed in the written word. If the seminal moment in the history of the book was the Gutenberg revolution, this work turns to the history of writing to help us understand our condition as children of that revolution.
--
--------------------------------
Dr. Naofumi NAKAMURA
Professor of Business History
Institute of Social Science,
The University of Tokyo