These intriguing articles explore the production, the selling, and the use in East Asia of two transformative modern machines. They look primarily at China but both give significant attention to Japan. It is a pleasure to have the opportunity to comment on them. I will spend more time with Antonia Finnane's article, “Cold War Sewing Machines,” as it treats an object near and dear to me (Gordon Reference Gordon2012).
Finnane makes an important contribution by showing so clearly that despite the very different political and economic systems in China and Japan in the Cold War era, the ways in which women understood and made use of the sewing machine were quite similar. In both societies, it figured as a tool for women as home-based producers, reflecting and reinforcing a gendered division of labor where women's productive work was often contained within the household unit. Not only in Japan, but also in the “decidedly productionist” China of the 1950s, “a history of advertising, fashion, and brand competition … left its mark on the industry.” As Finnane notes, I likewise see the sewing machine in Japan as a good that women used for production of clothes for the market, even as they often—and over time increasingly—saw it as a marker of middle-class membership linked to not only the consumption of the good itself but also the consumption of new media (monthly magazines), new modes of dress, and more generally a modern life whose keywords were “bright” and “new.”
I framed the Japanese story mainly in a global context of connectedness and comparison to Europe and especially the United States, the home of the Singer company, whose machines dominated world markets for decades. Finnane casts her story as a corrective or addition to this perspective by emphasizing Sino-Japanese links and comparisons. Her effort to uncover a history of connections that people at the time (as well as later historians) have failed to recognize is valuable. She shows that there were some noteworthy elements of interaction between the spread and the use of sewing machines in Japan and in China, and a significant regional dimension to this good's history. But in the end I remain convinced by the sources I explored that the West was the primary point of reference for Japanese sellers and buyers of the sewing machine, and I believe one finds relatively deeper connections to the Euro-American world in the spread and the understanding of this good in Japan.
The most notable regional context for Japan, I believe, was the interaction with its colonies, especially Korea. Singer, which accounted for about 80 percent of sewing machine sales in the Japanese empire, ran its operations in Korea through its corporate headquarters in Japan. One finds notable tensions between Japanese managers and Korean employees in the Singer sales operation based in Keijō (Seoul), which erupted briefly in a labor dispute in the summer of 1932 (Gordon Reference Gordon2012, 94, 103). One also finds important connections in the way the sewing machine came to be identified as the possession and one emblem of the “new woman” in both societies. Finnane makes a passing but telling reference to the Japan-Korea connections, and there is definitely room for a fuller exploration of these links.Footnote
1
A comparative analysis of similar processes that unfold in disconnected contexts is of course a different undertaking from a study that stresses connecting flows and interactions. Both have value, although in recent years the latter, whether called transnational or global history, seems to have won the day among academic historians. Mullaney's study of the typewriter is written entirely in a transnational mode, and offers a fascinating and unexpected story of technological innovations linking Japan and China in particular. But I believe the comparative approach, even absent intimate connections across cases, still has potential to offer strong insights. A fine example is the recent article by Amy Stanley (Reference Stanley2016) comparing narratives and experiences of maidservants across Eurasia from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century, which makes a compelling and refreshing case for writing comparative microhistory of people who were not in any way connected.
Finnane's article pursues both transnational/regional and comparative lines of argument. The greater weight of the analysis rests in the comparative inquiry. Still, the transnational elements are intriguing and surprising, beyond those noted above connecting Japan and Korea. These center particularly on the story not so much of the sewing machine itself—in comparison to Mullaney's article, where the design of the object itself is at issue—but on the cluster of practices that were connected to, and facilitated by, the spread of this machine. Finnane identifies a fascinating moment in the late 1940s and early 1950s when a package of practices came from Japan to China together with the export of the sewing machine: sewing schools and advertising served to transmit not only specific skills but an excitement at the potential of a new modern life, albeit one placed in a different ideological frame. The conduit appears to have been both the circulation in postwar China of prewar Japanese magazines, and the return to China of sewing teachers who had learned their skills in prewar Japan, and were happy enough to advertise this fact.
But other than this early postwar moment of about a decade's duration, the main story is an intriguing comparative one: the rise of domestic sewing machine production to huge numbers in both countries in the postwar era; the spread in both nations of sewing schools, and their place as the source of women's learning this skill (with a common reason for their prominence being the lack of heritage by which daughters could learn Western sewing skills from mothers); the comparable centrality of machine sewing skills in the role and identity of the housewife, a figure who could move out of the domestic realm to some extent via sewing; and a shift from homemade clothes, to tailor made, to ready-to-wear. Perhaps most interesting in Finnane's comparative analysis are the common elements in the ideology of the wife in a socialist China and a capitalist Japan, and the similar way sewing machines reinforced that ideology.
While less numerous, some difference in the two stories is also notable: in China, not surprisingly, there was very little room for dressmaking as a source of private profit, whether for individual women or for their families. In that sense, the role of the sewing machine as a good enabling women to claim a measure of independence or self-reliance seems to have been less prominent in China. And one finds in China a sharp decline in consumer-focused advertising by the mid-to-late 1950s era of anti-rightist campaigns. All told, the comparative story is one in which China and Japan do not greatly diverge in the celebration of a modern consumer life for the first decade of the Cold War era. And this divergence, once it happens, only persists for little more than two decades.
Finnane argues that the sewing machine was a producer good as much or more than it was an object of consumer desire. The point is a fair one, which I tried to make as well, beginning with my book's title, which suggests a history of consumers who made things as well as a history of the making of consumers. It is a point that applies to any number of goods that were “androgynous” in their identity as both producer tools and objects of consumption. The bicycle and the automobile or pickup truck fit this description. If we understand domestic labor as producing value for the family, so do household appliances such as washing machines, vacuum cleaners, or refrigerators. These had a consumer good element, as emblems of a middle-class lifestyle, and a producer aspect as work tools for housewives. Even the piano could be cast in both roles, as many women in Japan who mastered its use offered lessons to earn some extra money. In our own era, the personal computer fits both categories. The study of such machines serves to undercut any simple division of human activity into the realms of producing and consuming, even if that divide still retains value as a starting point for analysis. Perhaps the radio and television are the only truly important goods of twentieth-century origin that fall almost entirely on the consumption side, as machines with which users produce nothing and consume much—sound, image, and information—and, in the process, are excited by advertising to want ever more.
Conversely, the typewriter ranks as one of the most important mechanical goods of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to fall entirely in the realm of production. Mullaney's story differs significantly from that of Finnane in at least two ways. First, it presents a case of complex innovation in the design of the machine across and within different linguistic contexts. Neither Finnane nor I find any remotely comparable innovations in the history of the design of the sewing machine that can be connected to particular nations or dress cultures.
This is somewhat puzzling. Modes of clothing and of sewing differed across cultures, just as languages did. In Japan the sewing of traditional dress, generically termed wafuku in opposition to Western dress, was not amenable to the lockstitch that was the selling point for most sewing machines. A loose chain stitch was needed to allow women to unravel the thread so as to remove the inner lining for periodic replacement and cleaning, and the restitching. But the very earliest sewing machines in the nineteenth century were chain stitch machines, and they have continued to occupy a small niche mainly for industrial use. Both Singer and its emerging Japanese competitors early on faced the ultimately impossible challenge of convincing women that they could use a standard lockstitch machine in sewing wafuku. It was not until most women switched to Western dress in the late 1940s and early 1950s that the sewing machine took off in Japan. Before that happened, why did they not improvise the design of the machine to allow both chain stitching and lockstitching? Alternatively why did they not sell both types of machines in Japan? I have found no evidence of discussion of these alternatives in any sources, but my best guess is that, for Singer, the market in Japan was not large enough to justify such design innovation. But for the smaller Japanese competitors, the answer remains unclear. Probably they felt that only a tiny number of users would want to own two machines, and that a single dual-function machine would be too expensive and not worth developing for a limited national market. In any case, they were locked into lockstitching.
Given that nationally or culturally specific design innovation was not part of the sewing machine story as it was with the story of the typewriter, and that the latter was purely a producer good while the sewing machine crossed the consumer/producer boundary, what do we learn by looking at the two in tandem? I see at least two important lessons. First, I am struck by the extraordinary popularity of commercial schools offering practical skills training, whether for typing or for sewing, in both China and Japan, and in the case of colonial Korea as well for sewing schools, although in a far more constrained context. Such projects of mass commercial schooling for practical ends are hardly limited to Asia, but I do not think they are found in all modernizing places around the world in precisely the same way. It is clear to me that sewing schools in Japan were far more popular than they ever were in the United States, and Finnane shows they were extremely popular in China. Further study of the history of trade schooling might prove illuminating in understanding a history of education in modern East Asia that unfolded with only limited connection to the state.
Second, the two papers show that technology and machines carry with them a sometimes gendered politics of national and cultural identity. Mullaney's article makes clear that the political risks of carrying forward a suspect ethnic identity were high in the case of the development of typewriters in China across the middle decades of the twentieth century. This does not seem to have been the case for sewing machines; one of the teachers Finnane introduces “had no qualms” in the early postwar years about putting forward his Japanese experience as a selling point. This difference is intriguing. But Finnane and I certainly found that national and nationalistic competition in the production and supply of the sewing machine was intense in both China and Japan. And while the motives of women who sewed were surely diverse, including the pursuit of personal or family profit as well as creative pleasure, women who sewed were often presented in advertising and in journalistic accounts as daughters and mothers of the nation. Women were also described by dress reformers and culture critics, at least in Japan of the prewar and wartime era, as people negotiating their way in a “double life” (nijū seikatsu) of indigenous and foreign modes, expected to preserve the former even as they embraced the latter.
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These intriguing articles explore the production, the selling, and the use in East Asia of two transformative modern machines. They look primarily at China but both give significant attention to Japan. It is a pleasure to have the opportunity to comment on them. I will spend more time with Antonia Finnane's article, “Cold War Sewing Machines,” as it treats an object near and dear to me (Gordon Reference Gordon2012).
Finnane makes an important contribution by showing so clearly that despite the very different political and economic systems in China and Japan in the Cold War era, the ways in which women understood and made use of the sewing machine were quite similar. In both societies, it figured as a tool for women as home-based producers, reflecting and reinforcing a gendered division of labor where women's productive work was often contained within the household unit. Not only in Japan, but also in the “decidedly productionist” China of the 1950s, “a history of advertising, fashion, and brand competition … left its mark on the industry.” As Finnane notes, I likewise see the sewing machine in Japan as a good that women used for production of clothes for the market, even as they often—and over time increasingly—saw it as a marker of middle-class membership linked to not only the consumption of the good itself but also the consumption of new media (monthly magazines), new modes of dress, and more generally a modern life whose keywords were “bright” and “new.”
I framed the Japanese story mainly in a global context of connectedness and comparison to Europe and especially the United States, the home of the Singer company, whose machines dominated world markets for decades. Finnane casts her story as a corrective or addition to this perspective by emphasizing Sino-Japanese links and comparisons. Her effort to uncover a history of connections that people at the time (as well as later historians) have failed to recognize is valuable. She shows that there were some noteworthy elements of interaction between the spread and the use of sewing machines in Japan and in China, and a significant regional dimension to this good's history. But in the end I remain convinced by the sources I explored that the West was the primary point of reference for Japanese sellers and buyers of the sewing machine, and I believe one finds relatively deeper connections to the Euro-American world in the spread and the understanding of this good in Japan.
The most notable regional context for Japan, I believe, was the interaction with its colonies, especially Korea. Singer, which accounted for about 80 percent of sewing machine sales in the Japanese empire, ran its operations in Korea through its corporate headquarters in Japan. One finds notable tensions between Japanese managers and Korean employees in the Singer sales operation based in Keijō (Seoul), which erupted briefly in a labor dispute in the summer of 1932 (Gordon Reference Gordon2012, 94, 103). One also finds important connections in the way the sewing machine came to be identified as the possession and one emblem of the “new woman” in both societies. Finnane makes a passing but telling reference to the Japan-Korea connections, and there is definitely room for a fuller exploration of these links.Footnote 1
A comparative analysis of similar processes that unfold in disconnected contexts is of course a different undertaking from a study that stresses connecting flows and interactions. Both have value, although in recent years the latter, whether called transnational or global history, seems to have won the day among academic historians. Mullaney's study of the typewriter is written entirely in a transnational mode, and offers a fascinating and unexpected story of technological innovations linking Japan and China in particular. But I believe the comparative approach, even absent intimate connections across cases, still has potential to offer strong insights. A fine example is the recent article by Amy Stanley (Reference Stanley2016) comparing narratives and experiences of maidservants across Eurasia from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century, which makes a compelling and refreshing case for writing comparative microhistory of people who were not in any way connected.
Finnane's article pursues both transnational/regional and comparative lines of argument. The greater weight of the analysis rests in the comparative inquiry. Still, the transnational elements are intriguing and surprising, beyond those noted above connecting Japan and Korea. These center particularly on the story not so much of the sewing machine itself—in comparison to Mullaney's article, where the design of the object itself is at issue—but on the cluster of practices that were connected to, and facilitated by, the spread of this machine. Finnane identifies a fascinating moment in the late 1940s and early 1950s when a package of practices came from Japan to China together with the export of the sewing machine: sewing schools and advertising served to transmit not only specific skills but an excitement at the potential of a new modern life, albeit one placed in a different ideological frame. The conduit appears to have been both the circulation in postwar China of prewar Japanese magazines, and the return to China of sewing teachers who had learned their skills in prewar Japan, and were happy enough to advertise this fact.
But other than this early postwar moment of about a decade's duration, the main story is an intriguing comparative one: the rise of domestic sewing machine production to huge numbers in both countries in the postwar era; the spread in both nations of sewing schools, and their place as the source of women's learning this skill (with a common reason for their prominence being the lack of heritage by which daughters could learn Western sewing skills from mothers); the comparable centrality of machine sewing skills in the role and identity of the housewife, a figure who could move out of the domestic realm to some extent via sewing; and a shift from homemade clothes, to tailor made, to ready-to-wear. Perhaps most interesting in Finnane's comparative analysis are the common elements in the ideology of the wife in a socialist China and a capitalist Japan, and the similar way sewing machines reinforced that ideology.
While less numerous, some difference in the two stories is also notable: in China, not surprisingly, there was very little room for dressmaking as a source of private profit, whether for individual women or for their families. In that sense, the role of the sewing machine as a good enabling women to claim a measure of independence or self-reliance seems to have been less prominent in China. And one finds in China a sharp decline in consumer-focused advertising by the mid-to-late 1950s era of anti-rightist campaigns. All told, the comparative story is one in which China and Japan do not greatly diverge in the celebration of a modern consumer life for the first decade of the Cold War era. And this divergence, once it happens, only persists for little more than two decades.
Finnane argues that the sewing machine was a producer good as much or more than it was an object of consumer desire. The point is a fair one, which I tried to make as well, beginning with my book's title, which suggests a history of consumers who made things as well as a history of the making of consumers. It is a point that applies to any number of goods that were “androgynous” in their identity as both producer tools and objects of consumption. The bicycle and the automobile or pickup truck fit this description. If we understand domestic labor as producing value for the family, so do household appliances such as washing machines, vacuum cleaners, or refrigerators. These had a consumer good element, as emblems of a middle-class lifestyle, and a producer aspect as work tools for housewives. Even the piano could be cast in both roles, as many women in Japan who mastered its use offered lessons to earn some extra money. In our own era, the personal computer fits both categories. The study of such machines serves to undercut any simple division of human activity into the realms of producing and consuming, even if that divide still retains value as a starting point for analysis. Perhaps the radio and television are the only truly important goods of twentieth-century origin that fall almost entirely on the consumption side, as machines with which users produce nothing and consume much—sound, image, and information—and, in the process, are excited by advertising to want ever more.
Conversely, the typewriter ranks as one of the most important mechanical goods of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to fall entirely in the realm of production. Mullaney's story differs significantly from that of Finnane in at least two ways. First, it presents a case of complex innovation in the design of the machine across and within different linguistic contexts. Neither Finnane nor I find any remotely comparable innovations in the history of the design of the sewing machine that can be connected to particular nations or dress cultures.
This is somewhat puzzling. Modes of clothing and of sewing differed across cultures, just as languages did. In Japan the sewing of traditional dress, generically termed wafuku in opposition to Western dress, was not amenable to the lockstitch that was the selling point for most sewing machines. A loose chain stitch was needed to allow women to unravel the thread so as to remove the inner lining for periodic replacement and cleaning, and the restitching. But the very earliest sewing machines in the nineteenth century were chain stitch machines, and they have continued to occupy a small niche mainly for industrial use. Both Singer and its emerging Japanese competitors early on faced the ultimately impossible challenge of convincing women that they could use a standard lockstitch machine in sewing wafuku. It was not until most women switched to Western dress in the late 1940s and early 1950s that the sewing machine took off in Japan. Before that happened, why did they not improvise the design of the machine to allow both chain stitching and lockstitching? Alternatively why did they not sell both types of machines in Japan? I have found no evidence of discussion of these alternatives in any sources, but my best guess is that, for Singer, the market in Japan was not large enough to justify such design innovation. But for the smaller Japanese competitors, the answer remains unclear. Probably they felt that only a tiny number of users would want to own two machines, and that a single dual-function machine would be too expensive and not worth developing for a limited national market. In any case, they were locked into lockstitching.
Given that nationally or culturally specific design innovation was not part of the sewing machine story as it was with the story of the typewriter, and that the latter was purely a producer good while the sewing machine crossed the consumer/producer boundary, what do we learn by looking at the two in tandem? I see at least two important lessons. First, I am struck by the extraordinary popularity of commercial schools offering practical skills training, whether for typing or for sewing, in both China and Japan, and in the case of colonial Korea as well for sewing schools, although in a far more constrained context. Such projects of mass commercial schooling for practical ends are hardly limited to Asia, but I do not think they are found in all modernizing places around the world in precisely the same way. It is clear to me that sewing schools in Japan were far more popular than they ever were in the United States, and Finnane shows they were extremely popular in China. Further study of the history of trade schooling might prove illuminating in understanding a history of education in modern East Asia that unfolded with only limited connection to the state.
Second, the two papers show that technology and machines carry with them a sometimes gendered politics of national and cultural identity. Mullaney's article makes clear that the political risks of carrying forward a suspect ethnic identity were high in the case of the development of typewriters in China across the middle decades of the twentieth century. This does not seem to have been the case for sewing machines; one of the teachers Finnane introduces “had no qualms” in the early postwar years about putting forward his Japanese experience as a selling point. This difference is intriguing. But Finnane and I certainly found that national and nationalistic competition in the production and supply of the sewing machine was intense in both China and Japan. And while the motives of women who sewed were surely diverse, including the pursuit of personal or family profit as well as creative pleasure, women who sewed were often presented in advertising and in journalistic accounts as daughters and mothers of the nation. Women were also described by dress reformers and culture critics, at least in Japan of the prewar and wartime era, as people negotiating their way in a “double life” (nijū seikatsu) of indigenous and foreign modes, expected to preserve the former even as they embraced the latter.