12. China and Japan

The typewriters on display from Japan and China are a subject of curiosity. With their thousands of characters, Chinese script is an almost insurmountable challenge for typewriter design engineers. At over 7,000 years old, Chinese script, which is also the basis for the development of Japanese script, is one of the oldest in the world and has survived the last 2 millennia virtually unchanged. The word symbols which have developed from pictograms from drawn symbols describe the meaning on the one hand and the pronunciation on the other. In a similar way to earlier times in Egypt, those able to write in China enjoyed thousands of years of prestige as the minority, mainly priests and later learned clerks. Much earlier than in Europe, a remarkable step towards spreading the written form was made in China in the 8th Century with the invention of block printing and in the 11th Century with the invention of moving letters.
Chinese script came to Japan via Korean scribes who brought Buddhist and Confucian books to the country. At the beginning of the 8th Century, at the order of the Japanese Empress, the history of the Japanese people was written down and thus formed Japan’s first evidence of the transition from spoken to written language. In the 9th Century, 2 Japanese syllabaries were formed from the Chinese which are still used today. In 1917 a typewriter by “Nippon Typewriter” from Tokyo was put onto the market. The “Nippon type” displayed here comes from the early 60s. With over 3,000 characters, the machine resembles (in a similar way to the Chinese models) a mechanical letter case rather than a typewriter. The typebar technology otherwise used is replaced by a gripper arm here, which collects the individual type from the type case and presses it onto the rockers. Similarly, the “Toshiba” also operates using a semicircular type basket. This Japanese typewriter from the 30s became publicly known through “Tora Tora”, the American film about Pearl Harbor. In this, a Japanese Sailor uses the Toshiba. Otherwise, the new writing practice in Japan is down to the women. In the 20s, typists, together with telephonists, formed a new cosmopolitan-orientated generation of women. The Mogas or modern girls represent the Western consumer and lifestyle culture expressed in department stores, coffee houses and local bars.

The Chinese typewriters on display were manufactured in a public factory in Shanghai. The older of the two machines comes from Soho, the Chinese quarter in London.