Japan's Clocks & Time Culture

About this book

A travel guide gives the Sapporo Clock Tower a paragraph. A brand history gives you Seiko without the seasonal hours the industry grew out of. Japan's Clocks & Time Culture does the missing job: 200 Japanese clocks, makers, towers and time institutions — wadokei built for unequal hours, tower and station clocks, master makers and the modern industry, the customs of the lived day, and the calendars and atomic time behind them — in one uniform format, every entry giving History & Setting, Mechanism, Making & Makers, Time, Custom & Meaning, and Visiting, Seeing & Care, each entry written in full at 200+ words.

The foliot that breathes twice and the numerals that move to meet the hour. Ieyasu's European clock and the Mannen-dokei, the clock of ten thousand years. The Wako tower over Ginza, the platform second hand, the five o'clock chime over the loudspeakers, the speaking clock on 117. Grand Seiko and G-Shock, the 135th meridian at Akashi, era names from Taika to Reiwa, leap seconds and the JJY signal — the full span from a seventeenth-century foliot to the atomic clocks of NICT.

A front chapter teaches you to read a clock in four checks — Movement, Dial & Hands, Signal, and Keeping. There are no photographs: mechanisms are taught in words, for the eye. Fees, hours, exhibition rotations, schedules, line-ups and prices are never asserted; every entry asks you to confirm them on the official channel, and states honestly what you may handle and what you may only see.

Written and created in Japan by Japanese author Aki Wakamatsu. Published by Takikawa TOKOTOKO Kids LLC, a Japanese publisher in Hokkaido, Japan. Authentic Japanese content, carefully made in Japan — not mass-produced.