What is time made of? We might balk at such a question, and reply that
time is not made of anything--it is an abstract and universal
phenomenon. In Making Time, Yulia Frumer upends this assumption, using
changes in the conceptualization of time in Japan to show that humans
perceive time as constructed and concrete.
In the mid-sixteenth century, when the first mechanical clocks arrived
in Japan from Europe, the Japanese found them interesting but useless,
because they failed to display time in units that changed their length
with the seasons, as was customary in Japan at the time. In 1873,
however, the Japanese government adopted the Western equal-hour system
as well as Western clocks. Given that Japan carried out this reform
during a period of rapid industrial development, it would be easy to
assume that time consciousness is inherent to the equal-hour system and
a modern lifestyle, but Making Time suggests that punctuality and
time-consciousness are equally possible in a society regulated by a
variable-hour system, arguing that this reform occurred because the
equal-hour system better reflected a new conception of time -- as
abstract and universal--which had been developed in Japan by a narrow
circle of astronomers, who began seeing time differently as a result of
their measurement and calculation practices. Over the course of a few
short decades this new way of conceptualizing time spread, gradually
becoming the only recognized way of treating time.
