We all know that the Japanese have their own way of doing things, which we try our best to understand and emulate. It can be debatable whether the "Japanese Way" is actually better - I'm sure that in many cases that might well be true, but when it comes to telling the time, I think I'll stick with the western way. Or at least, I would have done had I been given the choice during the relevant period in history...
One of the earliest time-keeping devices was the incense clock. These began as straightforward “joss-sticks” that would burn at a steady rate and therefore designate the passing of time. A more elaborate form of incense clock called a “koban-dokei” was often used in Buddhist temples. The priests needed to keep track of time in order to pray at the right time of day, and temples would also announce the hour publicly by striking the temple bell the appropriate number of times.
The koban-dokei was a kind of box about twelve inches square divided into two levels. In the upper section was a tray containing wood-ash covered by a lattice to prevent draughts, in the lower were stored the tools required to prepare the clock. The ash was packed-down and smoothed over using the special tools, and then a template placed upon it. This allowed a pattern to be inscribed in the wood-ash, which was in turn filled with powdered incense and the template removed.
Once lit, the incense trail would burn at a constant rate and the time was indicated by how much of the pattern remained. Since this was always decreasing, the time periods were counted downwards and not upwards, which was to have a curious effect on the way the later mechanical clocks operated.
Temples were not the only establishments to use incense clocks. Low-ranking teahouses i.e. brothels, used a variation of them to determine how long a client would have with one of the teahouse women. Once the incense trail was exhausted, the (also exhausted?) client’s time was up.
A mechanical weight-driven clock as we might recognise it was invented in the early C16 in Germany and a clock of this kind was first introduced into Japan around 1550. As usual, Japanese craftsmen copied the mechanism and began to build their own clocks - only they weren't quite the same.
Now, it might seem that the whole point of a clock is that it measures time according to certain precise divisions. Hence we have seconds, minutes and hours, which are essentially constants for measuring the passing of time. Not so in Japan during the Edo Period.
The Japanese way was to split daytime and nighttime into six equal periods, but these “hours” were not named according to the number of chimes struck on the hour as we do in the west (1 o’clock, 2 o’clock etc). These twelve day and night periods were designated by the twelve creatures of the Chinese zodiac (rat, horse, monkey etc.).
A “yagura-dokei”, or “turret clock” was a fairly common weight-driven Japanese clock that had a dial with an outer and inner band. The outer band would show the zodiacal sign for the “hour”, and the inner would show the number of chimes struck on that “hour”. And unlike western timepieces, this dial rotated behind a fixed hand.
The Japanese started counting at midday and midnight, but because Buddhists use the chimes of one, two and three as the signal for prayer-time, they are not used in ordinary clocks. Also, because the older incense clocks indicated the time by the amount of unburned incense remaining, the “hours” were counted downwards.
So, a Japanese clock would strike 9 at midday or midnight, then work down to 4 chimes at the 6th “hour”, with 6 chimes at either sunrise or sunset. Are you with me so far, because it gets better.
When it came to the “half hour” chime, once again things were different. If the previous “hour” were an even number, the half-hour chime would be a single chime. But if the previous “hour” were an odd number, there would be a double chime for the half-hour. The entire strike sequence for a half-day was 9, 1, 8, 2, 7, 1, 6, 2, 5, 1, 4, 2, and then back to 9 for the other half-day of six equal periods. A total of 96 chimes per full day.
But there’s more. The length of the day changes during the course of the year. So, around the equinoxes, these day/night periods were approximately the same, but as the year passed the length of these periods would change. For example, at the winter solstice the six equal day-periods would be significantly shorter than the six equal night-periods - as much as half as long - but the clock would still have to accurately show the correct passing of time.
So, let’s take a half-day from midday to midnight. There are six “hours” and each “hour” is sounded by a number of chimes. We have to count downwards and so would expect to start at six chimes for midday and finish with one chime for the “hour” before midnight. But we can’t use one, two or three chimes, so we have to start at nine chimes and end on four. Plus there the one or two “half-hour” chimes, and the fact that from the fourth “hour” of sunset until sunrise the length of the “hour” is shorter.
Since the length of the “hours” in fact changed pretty much every day, ingenious devices were adopted to compensate for the variation in the length of day and night. Some clocks had sort of dual faces, one for day, one for night, which ran at different speeds. Other clocks had special counterweights that would alter the speed of the mechanism and had to be adjusted daily.
Clock maintenance was difficult and usually required the services of a professional “clock doctor” to take care of the timepiece. But well worth it when you consider that the price of a mechanical clock in those days was the equivalent of sixty years’ wages, and was really a luxurious indulgence rather than a useful instrument.
As you can tell, it was all very complicated, or should I say sophisticated, not unlike many things Japanese. Eventually, in 1873, soon after the Meiji restoration, the Japanese government saw the light (half-way through the hour of the rooster, no doubt) and adopted the western approach to time keeping, not to mention the Gregorian calendar. Now that reminds me of riots...
