This is the face of a clock.
And this is the face of a Japanese clock in the Edo Period [1603 - 1868].
And so are these.
People with eyes may notice that the length of the hours are inconsistent.
The Japanese used to see time differently.
And when European clocks entered Japan,
Japanese brains exited Japanese heads.
They thought these foreigners were hella whack.
Having 24 whole hours in one day?
Seems a bit excessive. How do you have room for anything else?
Traditionally, the Japanese saw time like this.
Two things, repeat after me.
Day hours were different from night hours,
and the length of the hours changed throughout the year.
They split the day into 12 hours.
Six for daytime, six for night.
Each hour had a cute little animal associated with it,
and that’s why Japan has been making
cute animals ever since.
So midnight was the hour of the rat,
and noon the hour of the horse.
Now I did some research and discovered that
daytime and nighttime usually don’t have the same length,
so how did day and night have the same number of hours?
It could only have made sense if the day hours
were of a different length from the night hours.
And so it was.
Having unequal hours wasn’t some mind blowing new concept.
Historians didn’t look at the Japanese system
and go all apeshit throwing poop at the walls.
Most cultures before modern times split the day and night into unequal hours.
Europeans did it until the 1700s, they were used to unequal things.
So the Japanese had 6 equal day hours
and 6 equal night hours,
and the day hours had a different length from the night hours,
which was all well and good, until you realize that
the length of day and night changed
depending on what time of the year it was.
For example, in summer the days are long and the nights short,
and the Japanese hours followed suit.
A day hour in Japan was anywhere from
76 to 156 modern minutes,
depending on whether you asked in December or June,
or whether your blind date was a 10 or a 3.
They rang bells to announce the time.
Each hour had a number of strikes to go with it.
Starting at midnight, you had 9 bell tolls--
we’ll call it 9 o’clock--
and the number went down 8 7 6 5 4,
then at noon it went back to 9, then it repeated.
Dawn always happened at 6 o’clock,
and dusk happened at the other 6 o’clock.
The day started and ended at 6
because 6 moved to whenever dawn and dusk happened.
It was a fact of the world,
just as true and natural for the Japanese as trees having leaves
and vending machines having adult toys.
Following a time system based on daylight made sense for daily life,
especially for farmers, who needed enough light
to go out into the fields to work
on watching for samurai coming to steal their s--t.
You might think that having hours that changed
throughout the year meant that people were never on time.
“Sorry boss, 6 o’clock came late today.”
But not true, ya dumb idiot.
People took time seriously.
Especially in the Edo Period, the city of Edo was huge,
it had more people than any loser European city.
A place like Edo ran on tight coordination, no place for people
chillin’ out maxing relaxing being late to things,
all cool and all shooting some b-ball outside of the school.
Before watches, the Japanese didn’t carry them around to tell the time.
Instead, Japanese towns and cities had networks of public bells,
like school bells but for life.
They also used other advanced technologies such as drums
and people who walked around smacking things together,
which could get confusing.
Oh is it 8 o’clock already?
No, Genji’s just beating his kids again.
Life revolved around these time bells.
Workers were often paid by the hour,
with their contracts listing their wages,
work hours by time of year, and even overtime.
Being late got you a pay cut.
Complaints about people being late were not uncommon,
so yes you were expected to be on time to things.
In the 1500s, the Japanese came face to face
with a different time system,
and stuck out their tongue.
When Europeans introduced mechanical clocks to Japan,
the Japanese elites thought these devices were beautiful,
technologically genius,
and hella useless.
Elites collected clocks not to tell the time,
but to tell the time they got a clock as a gift from a Westerner.
These things were s--t at keeping time,
but perfect at keeping clout.
The Japanese thought these foreign devices were weird
because the hours always had the same duration,
a summer hour lasted just as long as a winter hour.
Dawn started at a different time depending on the time of the year.
It was baffling.
These foreigners must not have been on time to anything.
How did they keep any schedules at all?
Instead of going, “Wow, our way of viewing time is inferior to the white devils’,”
Japanese artisans made their own clocks,
modifying the Western designs to show Japanese time.
The new clocks showed a different length of the hour for every season,
and a Japanese year had 24 seasons.
The public thought mechanical clocks were the peak of human invention,
like the smartphone
or that little tab in the aluminum foil box
that prevents the roll from moving about when you
pull out some foil.
Clockmakers got to work and Japanese style clocks surged into the market
like American troops into Middle Eastern countries.
There were big clocks, small clocks, hard clocks, and tall clocks.
These Japanese style clocks were trending for a while,
until the 1820s, where it became fashionable
to carry unmodified Western pocket watches.
If you were a sophisticated person,
you probably had a European watch,
and you probably couldn’t read it.
“Hey Sakura, what time is it?”
“Time to stop being poor, bish.”
Learning the Western time system became a bit more important.
The first group of people to learn it were clockmakers.
Then there were astronomers who started reading Western astronomy books.
And then Westernboos who collected foreign devices.
Clock pioneers wrote books and manuals on how to read them.
Now although people had foreign clocks,
Japan still ran on the traditional system.
People needed ways to translate
the time they saw on their European clocks
into useful Japanese time.
Nerds made tables that converted Western hours to Japanese hours
depending on the season,
but it was a pain to carry these tables around everywhere,
so people came up with another solution:
do the calculations in your head.
At the beginning of the year,
each Japanese day hour was about 2 Western hours plus 4 minutes.
If you start at a Japanese 9 o’clock, that was a Western 0:00.
Japanese 8 was a Western 2:04.
Japanese 7 a Western 4:08.
And that’s just one season.
There were 24 seasons,
each one with a different number of minutes to add.
Now you might think that this math
would have been complicated for people to do in their heads,
so you’re probably not Asian.
People got used to it
and just did the conversion in their heads,
earning approving nods from their parents.
That’s my boy.
Now if only he were a doctor like his cousin,
then I can die happy, rather than disappointed.
In 1873, the government saw how this
foreign idea of time was invading the country,
opposing Japanese thought.
The traditional time system was working fine,
and it had been a part of Japan for most of the country’s history,
so the government said,
“Well, that’s probably enough time,”
and dumped the traditional system.
“West time is best time,”
said the government officials stroking their pocket watches until completion.
They completed a law that made
the 24 fixed-hour system Japan’s official timekeeping system.
The hours became all free and equal,
which--good for them--but then the first problem they had to solve
was people being all confused about the new way of timekeeping.
The government and intellectuals started a campaign
to educate the masses
and convince them that really this is a good idea guys.
One intelligent intellectual said,
“a clock is a machine that is associated with modernity.
It helps people…not to be embarrassed by being late to an appointment.
It benefits the whole nation.”
Another one said that anyone who doubted the new time system
was “obviously an uneducated and ignorant fool.”
The uneducated and ignorant fools of Japan
thought Western time didn’t make no kind of sense,
and was a step backwards.
For example, people were used to looking at a Japanese clock
to see how much day or night was left,
but that information was missing on a European clock.
The public had to wrap their heads around
not viewing time in relation to
the beginning and end of the day.
Eventually, people forgot about the old system.
The first European clocks had arrived 300-400 years earlier.
People back then probably didn’t expect
to change their entire concept of time because of it.
It was Christians who first brought European clocks to Japan,
for God.
They had a whole strategy centered around clocks.
Click here to see how they did that.
We have some new patrons this week:
Elysse, and Music Rainfield that’s an awesome name.
Alright I love you, and spread the knowledge!