Stenography and ventriloquism in late nineteenth century Japan

In anticipation of the opening of the Diet (the Japanese national legislature) in 1890, Japanese entrepreneurs developed stenographic systems by adapting Western shorthand techniques. Stenography thus rendered it possible, at least in its claim, for the first time, for the speaking event temporally and spatially to be mobile and universally to re-present itself—with the original “truth” of the speech event intact. Drawing on archival material from organs of professional stenographers’ associations and primers for Japanese stenography published between the 1880s and the 1910s, this paper discusses how such presumed semiotic capacity was linked up with the production of the modern Japanese (speaking) subject.