The Uniqueness of Japanese Time

Isolated for centuries while the rest of the world was industrializing, Japan developed many unique ways of living. One of the strangest to our modern thinking was a system for counting time where the length of an hour changed daily. The way of counting time used everywhere now is called a “fixed hour system.” Each day has 24 hours, and each hour is the same length of time. We further divide each hour into 60 minutes of 60 seconds, derived from Babylonian numerology. A fixed time system is well suited to mechanical (and now electrical) time counting devices — clocks. A clock uses either a pendulum or spring (and now quartz crystals) to mark fixed amounts of time. Add the right set of gears (or chips) and it’s easy to count the minutes and hours of the day. <a href="https://medium.com/japonica-publication/the-uniqueness-of-japanese-time-d5e1945f2819">Learn More</a>