One day the lord Tokugawa Ieyasu woke up
to find that his clock was broken.
It was a European clock that some Korean ambassador gave to him.
Ieyasu said, “It would be quite rude to
throw away this gift from my Korean friends.
After all, I foresee Korea and Japan being on good terms for a long while.”
So he called a metalworker who was familiar
with European clocks, named Tsuda Sukezaemon 津田助左衛門.
This guy serviced Ieyasu’s clock so well that Ieyasu said,
“Now you only service my clocks.”
He became the clock guy for the Tokugawa family.
They say he started the RPG profession of mechanical clockmaking in Japan.
He taught his children, and his children taught theirs,
and pretty soon they became a long line of clockmakers,
all taking the name of Tsuda Sukezaemon.
It was the ancient Japanese art of forcing
a career upon your kids, and it worked well.
The road to family success is paved with the dead dreams of your children.
Japan had reached the age of mechanical clocks. Good job.
Now it wasn’t like the Japanese couldn’t tell time before this,
they weren’t going around having lunch at dinner, no.
The first ever record of a clock in Japan was of Emperor Tenji
making a water clock in the year 660 or 671.
Water flowed from containers to lower containers.
The last one had a cute floatie with an arrow stuck to it,
an arrow carved with 100 notches.
As the water level rose so did the arrow, and people kept time by counting the number
of notches peeking above the top of the container.
A water clock was hard to keep in the bedroom or carry around,
so they had smaller fire clocks.
Temples used clocks that burned incense.
Incense burned at a steady rate,
so if you had a line of incense powder,
you could light it at one end and tell the time by how much had burned.
Now unlike coke,
laying one full line of incense would take up too much space,
so people made it into a twisty turny pattern.
An incense clock was a box of sand or wood ash.
They used a stencil to make the pattern of incense on it.
You could read the time by looking at the pattern itself,
or sometimes people stuck little signs to mark the hours.
Now one thing that later mechanical clocks could do
was tell you the time even without you having to look at them.
Every hour, they would ring a bell, and the number of rings told you what hour it was.
It was simple, smart, and annoying af.
Incense clocks had no such power,
but they did have an awesome way to announce the time
without people having to look at them.
Can you guess how, in the comments? No cheating.
I’ll give you the answer a bit later.
Another type of fire clock was the incense stick clock.
Same concept, if you knew how much time an incense stick took to burn,
you could place a bunch of sticks on a box and light them one-by-one.
Problem was, you had to light the next stick
exactly when the current one finished.
Ain’t no samurai got time for that, there were classic movies to make.
So these clocks were mostly used to measure time in small chunks,
famously used in geisha houses and brothels.
When a client wanted to buy some time with a courtesan,
he would buy incense sticks from the brothel.
Incense sticks were time in physical form.
One stick took about half a modern hour to burn.
So a customer would say, “I’ll buy one stick please,” or “I’ll have two sticks.”
Not gonna brag but I’m a four-stick man myself.
The client would go into the service room,
while outside, a timekeeper managed the clock,
which was a block with a row of holders.
The timekeeper would put the stick on a holder, light it,
and hang a tablet with the courtesan’s name on it.
Sometimes a sneaky prostitute would snap off
a piece of the stick, the incense stick,
to shorten her work time,
but that’s probably because you visited a shady establishment.
Join my Patreon for a guide to where the reputable establishments are.
The Japanese also had sundials and hourglasses,
but you already know how those work.
Some of you were probably familiar with the incense stick clock, too.
I know the viewers of this channel are smart and knowledgeable,
and perverts.
Now before you start buying fire clocks and
starting your own massage parlor,
you should know that water and fire clocks had problems too.
They were at the mercy of the environment.
Temperature and humidity affected how fast
water evaporated and how fast incense burned.
But everything changed when the mechanical clocks came to Japan.
Europeans brought mechanical clocks to Japan in the 1500s,
and the Japanese said,
“Wow, these are super inaccurate actually, I’ll take 100.”
They thought clocks were amazing machines, but useless at telling time.
The Europeans used the 24-hour system that we use today,
but the Japanese time system was different.
They split the day into 6 hours and the night into 6 hours,
so day hours and night hours had different durations.
Not only that, the durations changed throughout the year.
For example, since summer days are longer than winter days,
summer day hours were longer than winter day hours.
The important thing for them was that dawn and dusk always landed at 6,
this fact was ingrained into Japanese heads
since they escaped from Japanese wombs.
But in the European system,
dawn and dusk landed at different times throughout the year.
The Japanese were shocked SHOCKED that these foreigners
did not design their time around dawn and dusk.
And then got over it when they banned Europeans from Japan in the 1600s.
Without European clockmakers to learn from,
Japanese clockmakers in the Edo Period [1603 - 1868]
took apart Western clocks to see how they worked,
and then made their own mechanical clocks that measured Japanese time.
We now call these Japanese clocks wadokei 和時計, which means Japanese clocks.
All mechanical clocks need a power source.
For early clocks, Westerners decided to use gravity as a source of energy,
by hanging weights at the bottom.
They could have used their most abundant form of energy at the time,
but slaves were too big to fit in clocks.
On top of the clock was a bar that moved
horizontally left and right, called a foliot.
Its speed determined the speed of the clock.
The first problem the Japanese had to solve
was how to make the clock run at two speeds:
a day speed and a night speed.
Luckily, they found a solution to this problem
from a European solution to a different problem.
The gears on early clocks were like marriages,
they wore out easily,
causing clock speeds to change over time,
so the Europeans hung these weights on the foliot
to adjust the speed back to normal.
Move them out to slow the clock, move them in to speed it up.
The Japanese figured,
hey why don’t we just change the weight position twice a day:
at dawn and at dusk.
Bit of a hassle, but in the early days of the clock revolution,
those who owned mechanical clocks were the rich and the publicly rich,
people who could hire clockmakers to come
twice a day to change the weights.
And so was birthed the first Japanese clocks.
Many clock masters didn’t even make their own clocks.
It was a piece of mochi cake to just take a Western clock, change the gears a bit,
slap a Japanese clock face on it, and call it a day.
Even though Japan cut contact with Europeans,
they still had limited trade with the Dutch,
and the Japanese scooped up clocks from Dutch hands
like clocks were Rogaine and they were going bald.
The shogun Tokugawa Hidetada was a man who loved his mighty clock.
This man followed a schedule like it was Jesus.
For example, he would do falconry at 6 every morning.
If the clock chimed 6 in the middle of his breakfast,
the shogun would throw away his chopsticks and Usain Bolt to his falcon.
Once, while he was eating, his attendants didn’t want to interrupt his meal,
so they stopped the clock from ringing.
When one lord heard what happened,
he spit Buddhist hellfire at them
because that was the opposite of what the shogun would’ve wanted.
By the late 1600s,
clocks had spread from the fancy halls of the elites
to the pee coated streets of the public.
More clients meant good business for clockmakers.
But it also meant having to visit a thousand clients twice a day.
It was horrible.
Probably had to turn back their client’s clocks to give themselves more time.
How did they get away with that?
A hundred clockmakers cried out to the clock gods while rubbing their sore feet,
and the clock gods said,
“We help those who help themselves,”
and the clockmakers came up with a solution.
They added a second foliot.
Boom.
Now there was a daytime foliot and a nighttime foliot,
and the clock automatically switched between them everyday.
You still had to change the weights every 2 weeks
because the hours changed duration throughout the year,
but it was better than twice a day.
There were two main ways of showing the time.
Some clocks had the hand move around, which is what we’re used to.
But others had the hand frozen in the up position,
and the dial moved.
The earliest Japanese clocks were put on a pedestal,
and was called the dai-dokei 台時計, or pedestal clock,
sporting one or two stylish foliots.
Clocks were still rare at the time, so the pedestals often had fancy designs.
Doesn’t she look swanky?
Perfect for showing off to friends and enemies.
Large dai-dokei clocks could be found in
public places like castles and assembly halls.
Such treasures should not be enjoyed privately.
And then people realized,
“Oh yeah this is Japan, where the ground is made of Jenga tiles,”
so they made a more earthquake friendly stand
and put clocks on top of that.
These were called yagura-dokei 櫓時計, or watchtower clocks.
This classy design gave clocks back some semblance of decency,
preventing their balls from being on display to the world.
If you don’t want a big ol thing taking up floor space,
never fear, there’s a clock for you.
This is a kake-dokei 掛け時計, or an attached clock.
She’s the same device that you know and love,
but with a smart, sophisticated little hoop in the back for hanging,
perfect for houses with walls.
Alas, the supremacy of the foliot would not last forever.
In the late Edo Period, a new clock design snuck into Japan from Europe.
The foliot was out, replaced by the balance wheel.
Without the foliot, you could no longer change the speed of the clock.
The hand always moved at the same rate,
so they were forced to change what the hand was pointing at.
This guy was called shaku-dokei 尺時計, or pillar clock.
Shaku was just a unit of length, though these clocks came in all sizes.
It was still powered by weights hidden inside.
At the front is an elegant hand that travels
up and down a lovely wooden exterior,
and hour markers that nicely complete the look.
These you can move every 2 weeks to match the duration of daylight.
It introduced a problem though.
Moving those markers to the right spots was a huge pain.
By the time you were done, you had to change it again.
So people started making clocks with a whole
set of faces with the hour markers already
in the right spots.
When it came time to adjust the clock, you only had to replace the face.
This clock went even further.
It had a bunch of vertical timelines,
and a clock hand pointed to which line was in use.
Every two weeks, you only had to move the
hand horizontally to the next vertical line.
The horizontal curved lines were the hour markers.
The clock hand moved down, passing through the hours of its current line.
After the death of the foliot, another breakthrough
from Europe rocked the Japanese clock community:
spring powered clocks.
They no longer needed weights.
You just wound up the clock and let it go, can’t hold it back anymore.
Without weights, clocks could be much smaller.
The number of designs exploded all across the face of the clock community.
The makura-dokei 枕時計 meant pillow clock,
because it was shaped kind of like the pillows that geisha used.
No weights meant you could put it on a table or the floor,
or set it aside when doing chores.
Clockmakers also started making these dials that allowed you to move the hours.
They were little plates you could move.
Remember, the clock had only one speed,
so changing the spacing of the hours
was the only way to show different hour durations for day and night.
Here’s a pretty cool smaller clock.
Remember those shaku clocks with a whole graph on the front?
This was a round version of those.
To read the time, you look at the tip of the hand, not just the direction.
It didn’t even need 2-week adjustments.
Its hand went in a circle and became shorter
and longer depending on the time of the year.
Here’s an inro-dokei 印籠時計, a pill box clock.
It was a pocketwatch, but not kept in pockets.
Rather, it hung on the sash.
Finally, they made more familiar pocket watches.
These were mostly English watches that people modified
to include both Western and Japanese time.
Now during this whole mechanical clock invasion,
it wasn’t like people stopped using other clocks.
Incense clocks were still common because they were super cheap.
Incense clocks didn’t ring, but they did have a way to announce the time.
Instead of bells, they used smells.
People could use a different incense powder for every hour,
each with their own fragrance.
People could tell what hour it was by the smell.
Eventually, when Japan started to modernize,
they made the Western time system official,
and that was the end of wadokei clocks.
The Japanese initially thought the European time system was useless,
and preferred the Japanese way.
The traditional system stuck around for a long time,
and actually made sense for them.
Click this video to learn all about it.
We have some new patrons this week:
BisonBlitz, Mikey Haverich, and TalisX.
Thank you so much, you’re all amazing.
Alright I love you, and spread the knowledge!