Name: The Chinese Typewriter
ISBN: 9780262036368

Thomas S. Mullaney

Incompatible with modernity -- Puzzling Chinese -- Radical machines -- What do you call a typewriter with no keys? -- Controlling the Kanjisphere -- QWERTY is dead! Long live QWERTY! Lin Yutang and the birth of input -- The typing rebellion

A History

The Chinese Typewriter

里森

Kanji typewriters were not developed until fifteen years after their all-kana predecessors.

From its inception, the all-kana typewriter was a machine with a politics, wherein modernization was premised on cutting the Japanese language’s ties with its Chinese orthographic heritage. The trope of the impossible, monstrous Chinese typewriter examined in chapter 1 was here mobilized in a Japanese context as a kind of cautionary tale (lest Japan too find itself excommunicated from the universe of modernity).

The Chinese Typewriter A History