Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/03/13/why-did-a-japanese-lord-in-the-16th-century-reject-the-gift-of-a-clock.html
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At Burning Man, we’d always eat dinner at half past dark.
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I think about this every time we switch over for Daylight Savings Time. Before steam trains and speedy travel every town/city set its own clocks, even traveling north/south you’d have to reset your pocket watch to local time.
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Maybe it didn’t do a very good job of scaring the deer?
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Years ago I saw a stand-up comic riffing on subjective measurements. He was talking about temperatures measured with wind chill added, where the weatherman would say “well it’s 30 degrees out but with this wind it’s going to feel like 10 degrees…” He wondered why that didn’t apply more broadly and imagined a morning newscast: “good Monday morning! It’s 8:00 am, but you were out late, and are maybe a little hungover, so it’s going to feel like about 4:30 am…”
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ours is after the sun passes behind the mountains, and we’re done howling.
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Was it considered acceptable in 16th century Japan to reject gifts that one was not interested in? This sounds more like a deliberate insult, maybe because Nobunaga did not want to be seen accepting gifts from Jesuits, who were not popular in Japan at the time.
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I’m guessing so, yes.
Well, they were certainly popular with the lords who they were arming, I’m guessing. But there were generally probably very good reasons for not liking the Jesuits (as they were very much currying favor by cozying up to particular people during the ongoing civil war). The Japanese had relatively good reason for closing their borders to Europeans, frankly, and given what Europeans did to China (and like, everywhere else) a couple centuries later, their concerns seem pretty justified.
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I wonder if the Chinese and Indian taboo on giving clocks and watches as gifts extended to Japan in the 16th century.
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Owning a clock in a society where no one else goes by standardized time seems about as useful as being the only person in the world to own a telephone.
Standardized time really only matters for coordinating your activities with others. If no one else has a clock then what are you worried about being on time for?
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Well, but the POINT is that they told time in other ways… not that they didn’t have a means of keeping time…
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It clearly wasn’t of interest; but unless it was a fairly trash clock it seems like it would have some merit as a sculpture/mechanical curiosity of the sort that people have often been quite fond of.
Not any more functional than some whimsical animatronic; but it’s not like mechanical timepieces survive to this day on their functional merits.
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As the article notes, quite a few local lords did enjoy them as curiosities and status symbols even if they weren’t initially useful for telling time. Maybe this specific lord was really more concerned about strings attached to accepting such a gift.
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The Romans did the same. Up until 1300 or 1400 they did the same in England. Then people started making mechanical clocks.
In Rome you could get a water clock to keep “12 hours of light and 12 hours of dark” time. These devices could be changed as the seasons changed. Either you had a setting for changing the flow rate or your simpler solution was to have different graduated cylinders for reading the time.
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This is al-Jazeri’s Beaker Water Clock, whose dial has engravings so that you can account for time of year. You place the scribes pointer on the correct line and it will run for 24 hours (in modern measurement). I got a replica about half built before I failed to be able to regulate the drip rate. The dial was going to be a real challenge. The British museum had a replica of the Damascus gate clock going at one point-it’s over 12 feet tall, 8 feet wide and has dozens of automata all water powered.
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I don’t think that’s very likely. Clocks are commonly given as gifts in Japan, so there doesn’t seem to be any vestige of any such belief.
The only thing that I can find in modern gift guides is the caution that “clocks should not be given to someone above your station” as that would be “a subtle reminder that they need to keep track of time.”
Source: 避けた方が良い贈り物とは？～贈り物のタブー・プレゼントのNG編～ | 株式会社エウレカ
I don’t know whether that stretches back to the 16th century, but it is possible and in keeping with his personality that Nobunaga acted when he felt like it without being beholden to time.
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The show is set in the 17th century, not the 16th. Clocks were pretty rare, very inaccurate, and typically quite large in the 16th century.
I recently acquired a middle Edo period Shaku-Dokei (18th century Japanese pillar clock) from the Tokugawa shogunate that uses the traditional Japanese timekeeping system. It’s a gorgeous object, and a great conversation piece that teaches people about other ways we’ve used to tell time in the past.
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True, but Nobunaga, or Oda The Clock Spurner as he has since been known, rejected the gift in the 16th century.
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Actually, the show is set in the year 1600, which is still technically the 16th century.
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As tudza notes, England used the “unequal hours of the day and night” for quite a while, because that made more sense than having sunrise and sunset wander all around the clock dial if you were a farmer. I’ve wished for some time that I could get a face for my Apple watch that kept the unequal hours.
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