Japanese lives in the Edo period

In 1603, Tokugawa Ieyasu(1543-1616) established the Tokugawa Shogunate (also known as the Tokugawa Bakufu) in Edo, which is present-day Tokyo.

Throughout the Edo period, people lived in tune with the sun...

At dawn, they woke up, and at sunset, they ate supper, took a bath, and slipped into their futon (traditional Japanese bedding).

To light their small rooms, people used Japanese andon (paper-shaded lamps) fuelled by rapeseed oil or candles made from vegetable wax (Rhus succedanea) or beeswax. However, because these lighting oils and candles were quite expensive, people used them as sparingly as possible to save money—which naturally meant they went to sleep very early!

For supper, they typically ate white rice and miso soup containing tofu, aburage (fried tofu), daikon radish, and other seasonal vegetables, accompanied by boiled greens and occasionally grilled fish as a source of protein. It is often said that they never ate meat due to religious reasons. However, much like modern Japanese people, their religious beliefs were quite flexible, so they would sometimes sneak in chicken, quail, rabbit, or even wild boar. Even today, we might hold a wedding in a Christian-style chapel-me too!-, visit a Shinto shrine when a baby is born, and have our funerals at a Buddhist temple... Westerners just can't understand us!

They lived in poverty, so thriftiness was their usual policy. Of course, they could not afford to buy clocks.

People knew the time when they heard the bell ring at the local temple.

In Edo, the bell rang every two hours. This corresponded to one toki, which was a Japanese double-hour. Because Edo was the centre of Japanese politics, a bell system marking every single toki was essential. In other major cities like Kyoto, Osaka and Nagoya, the same bell system was in place.

In local and rural areas, villages usually formed around a temple. A monk at the local temple would ring the bell at dawn, noon, and sunset. To keep track of the time, he would burn an incense stick and check its progress against markings on the surface. The length and markings varied depending on the seasons, which we will explore in the next chapter. To correct a common misconception, I should point out that time was not determined simply by surrounding brightness. It is often said that monks used to tell the time by checking whether the lines on their palms were visible; however, this is incorrect.

When Ieyasu entered Edo Castle, a bell time system already existed to inform the samurai of the exact time. The long period of Japanese civil wars was over and samurai had transitioned from soldiers into bureaucrats. They also lived in Edo, but were strictly segregated from ordinary people. Their residential quarters surrounded Edo Castle, occupying a massive area of the city.

The ordinary people, known as chomin, lived in the downtown districts that surrounded the castle and samurai quarters. This area stretched from Fukagawa and Kameido in the east to Shinjuku in the west, and from Shinagawa in the south to Senju and Itabashi in the north. The chomin consisted mostly of artisans, labourers, and merchants. Outside these residential zones lay rice fields and farms, while Edo Bay provided an abundant supply of fresh fish. Thus, world famous sushi culture was born. Clean water was supplied from the mountainous areas of Musashino.

The greater city of Edo was known as the Shubiki area, officially defined by the Edo Shogunate in 1818. By around 1700, its population had already exceeded one million, making Edo one of the largest cities in the world.

In other countries.......Two Paths of Horology: Adaptation versus Conformity

In medieval Europe, everyday life was not so different from that of Japan. 

The vast majority of the population were agrarian, living in rhythm with the sun. Intriguingly, their timekeeping system also mirrored Japan’s seasonal time system (futeiji-hō 不定時法).

People woke to the peeling of church bells announcing the morning service. The day was partitioned into seven or eight liturgical intervals based on the Canonical Hours: Matins, Prime, Terce, Sext, Nones, Vespers, and Compline. This was a temporal hour system—where the length of an "hour" expanded and contracted with the seasons—much like the system adopted in Japan.

However, the advent of mechanical clocks in the 14th century fundamentally altered European society. 

Europe embraced equinoctial hours (fixed-length hours), and people gradually shifted to living by the clock rather than by the sun. By the 16th to 18th centuries, public clocks atop church towers chimed automatically every fixed hour, dictating the pace of civic life.

Here lies a fascinating historical divergence. 

While European society transformed its lifestyle to conform to the rigid, constant ticks of the mechanical clock, Japan took the opposite approach: Japanese artisans modified the clock mechanism itself to serve their traditional, nature-bound way of life.

Rather than forcing society to adapt to fixed hours, Edo-period artisans developed ingenious mechanisms—most notably the double-foliot (nicho-tempu 二挺天符) wadokei—to automatically adjust the length of an hour day and night throughout the changing seasons. European engineers never attempted such a trick to vary the length of an hour; some horologists even suggest they lacked the cultural impetus to try.

After the invention of mechanical timekeeping, Europe and Japan walked entirely different paths. It is precisely this refusal to compromise traditional time perception that makes wadokei so extraordinarily unique in the global history of horology.

Reflecting on Modern Perspectives 

Europe and Japan took vastly different paths in developing not only clocks and technology, but also the  structure of society in adapting to its environment.

This contrast reveals a fundamental difference in how technology and human life interact. 

While Europe gradually adapted society to conform with technological systems, Japan refined technology itself to harmonise with natural human rhythms and seasonal environments.

Recognising these diverging paths provides us with a deeper appreciation for the rich diversity in the history of technology—a distinction that continues to shape modern approaches to design and innovation. More importantly, understanding these alternative ways of thinking may offer valuable insights into addressing today’s complex environmental and societal challenges.