The Typewriter and the Brush: Modernity and the Aesthetics of Writing in Japan and Egypt, 1872–1950

One of the characteristics of a modern curriculum was a relatively extensive list of subjects, and in both Japan and Egypt these subjects included penmanship.  Like the European and American teachers’ manuals on which they were modeled, Egyptian and Japanese manuals focused on three aspects of the child’s writing: clarity, speed, and beauty.  Writing was a functional code seeking to transmit meaning clearly and rapidly.  Different scripts (kaisho, gyôsho, and sôsho in Japan and naskh, thuluth, and riq‘a in Egypt) were deployed for different occasions, such as for taking rapid notes or writing a section heading.  The functional nature of penmanship in the modern primary school led to the incorporation of penmanship class into language in 1886 in Japan and in 1930 in Egypt (1947 for non-elite lower primary schools).
           Next to the official state curricula, however, it is occasionally possible to hear the voice of advocates for teaching penmanship as an art.  Although visible in both regions, this movement is more easily traceable in Japan, especially from the mid-1920s.  In 1941, for the first time since 1886, penmanship was officially reinstituted as an independent subject in Japanese primary schools, where it was taught as an art and a ritual intended to teach a sense of aesthetics and the perfection of character (jinkaku kansei).  Yet parallel to penmanship class, writing continued to be taught in language class for functional purposes.  In this way, penmanship education in Japan was bifurcated into an art and a ritual on the one hand and a means of communicating meaning on the other.  This bifurcation never occurred in Egypt, where penmanship continued to be a functional means of expressing meaning.  This presentation argues that these bifurcated and unitary approaches to penmanship education in Japan and Egypt represent two approaches to negotiating cultural modernity.