JAPAN: AND THE LAST SHALL BE FIRST^359The other two major European imports were eyeglasses and the
clock. We know little about the former, except that the Japanese
learned to make them. We know more about the clocks, because many
of them have survived. Here again, the Japanese proved an ability to
make a foreign object their own. Unlike the Chinese, they made clocks
on a large scale, and not only for princes, but for a wider clientele and
in forms distinctively Japanese. Nothing like them can be found any
where else, and no other non-European country succeeded in so indi-
genizing this European innovation.^10 The Japanese, moreover, took to
personal timekeeping as the Chinese did not. After a while, they
bought no more European watches; nor did they buy watches in pairs
as the Chinese did in hope that one would work; or wear them in pairs
in hope that one would be right (but which one?). Rather, they minia
turized their own clocks so as to make them portable and wearable (the
definition of a watch). These worked adequately.
I say "adequately" because these Japanese clocks could not be really
accurate. That was because Japanese time measurement gainsaid the
mechanical clock, and they were not about to change their system.
The Japanese kept unequal hours—unequal as between day and night,
unequal across seasons. They divided daytime and nighttime separately
into equal parts, so daytime hours equaled night hours only at the
equinoxes; and of course day hours were longer in summer, shorter in
winter, and vice versa for night hours.
The mechanical clock, for its part, kept an equal rhythm—equal
hours at all times; at least that was its intended nature. The Japanese
tried to solve this dilemma by devising clocks that beat at different
rhythms night and day, or by varying the display to show different
hours; but these were at best makeshifts. Every setting was wrong from
the start. In theory the clocks should have been adjusted daily, but this
was a pain; so one corrected every two weeks—when one remembered.
No matter, the time indicated was inevitably approximate.
To be sure, these approximations sufficed for social purposes. Even
today, with quartz timekeepers that are accurate to seconds, we run our
lives to a margin of tolerance—whether as a courtesy to other people
or comfort to ourselves. Meanwhile want of precision timekeeping
kept the Japanese from exploiting the clock for its scientific and tech
nical potential. When the Japanese decided on modernization in the
late nineteenth century, they early on gave up their own time and went
over to equal hours. (The Europeans had done this from the start—had
exchanged church hours for civil time.)