"European accustomed to disequality", and shows a picture of a slavist ship. Europe was indeed a land of inequality MEANING nobles owned everything, and people nothing, a feudal sistem imported from the barbarians from east (Rome was a res publica). Regarding SLAVERY (a truly comptemptible thing) was NOT a european phenomenon, doesnt matter how strong idiotic, false, woke cancel-culture tries. There was extensive use of slaves in Egypt millennia before Europe was even a thing. Egypt is in Africa, not in Europe. Slavery was diffused in all Africa, actually, and was practiced between different tribes. Then the concept passed to the phoenicians, the greeks and eventually the romans, that however used to pay wages to their workforce, and free deserving slaves. In these cruent times, a fair treatment. Point out that yes, westerners used slavery until 19th century (before the abolition). Many easterners and southerners still treat their citizens far worse than slaves, still today. Want to talk inequality? Try women in Iran, or Uighurs in China, or anyone but Kim Jong Un in Korea. Or incur in the wrath of all those, sick of woke rethoric and cancel culture, that will stop your interesting video and hit the thumb down. Equalling Europe with slavery is an historical false, and by the way the black african amazon portaited by super woke Viola were actually capturing slaves, not fighting for freedom. Because THIS IS WHAT HAPPENED.
I appreciate the well thought out comment, so I'll respond :) Perhaps you are reading too much into a throwaway joke? Slavery was common in all parts of the world. Saying "Europe had slaves" does not mean "ONLY Europe had slaves." Like when I joked about the Japanese beating their kids, I didn't mean Japan was the only culture that did. Also, talking about how Europe engaged in slavery in the past says nothing about modern Europeans, so bringing up the wrongs of China or other non-European countries in the modern day is irrelevant. I'm not going around comparing the East to West, trying to gauge which was better over their entire history. I don't care to compare cultures like that, seems kinda weird. Sometimes I just want to make a joke without giving 10 caveats about how "these other people do it too." Seems a bit snowflakey to expect that. In fact it makes me want to joke about it more to trigger the haters lol I joke about Japan all the time in past videos, AND this one. Imagine if I had to qualify every time that "non-japanese do it too." You're free to disagree, but at least you understand where I'm coming from :) TL;DR Saying "Europe had slaves" does not mean "ONLY Europe had slaves." Chill.
@@Linfamy An unbearable overdose of rabid woke people triggered anything is being said, probably, lowered my tolerance for jokes about europeans. You know, if you make a joke about black people saying they are unwashed (stupid stereotype) there is an uproar. Bashing europeans, ok, nobody says a thing. I am against racism, against privilege, against power without balance . So you know as well who I am, a honest libertarian. These days europeans are demonized like jews were demonized by the nazis, or americans in NK. At a certain point, it ceases to be funny. Europe has a dirty conscience, yes, but virtually any technical, scientific, artistic, political advancement of mankind, in the past four centuries, basically sprouted from the old continent, in particular about civil right for people of all races. I don't talk with wokes, I have commented your (interesting) video because I sensed the good faith and some brilliancy. Just wanted to point out that enough is enough, and Europe=slavery is simply untrue, and repeating this prejudice reinforces a sick narrative. Couldnt like the video, but liked your mannered, intelligent, well placed reply. One of the thumbs up there is mine. Take care.
Generally Europeans are blamed for slavery in western nations. They get the most scrutiny and criticism about it. This treatment itself is unequal and becomes tiring and has become dangerous.
The Godfather of the Modern African/European/New World Slave trade was Mansa Musa. Musa, Mansa is not a name but a title, was the king of the empire of Mali. He was a black Islamic dictator who was also the richest single person ever to live and that includes anyone alive today. His total net wealth in real US dollars today is estimated at easily 400 billion dollars. Mali was blessed with abundant gold mines that were easy to mine and harvest. This is how Musa got his seed money but what made him insanely wealthy was the slave trade. Musa set up trading posts throughout Africa to supply the need which was more brutal than anything in the Americas, either continent to come. The main call for slaves was to supply labor for the Saharan trade routes to the middle east. Musa being a good Muslim went on his pilgrimage to Mecca and as good Muslims do he gave out money and treasure to those who crossed his path. Musa's pocket change was so rich that he actually doubled the net GDP of every town and village his caravan passed through. As one would expect word of this travelled and the Portuguese heard about it. They came sailing down the west coast of Africa looking for Gold. They found a niche market that Musa could not compete with. The African West Coast was not conducive to safe ports being rocky and high cliffs and so the Africans never developed a sophisticated shipping industry. Thus the Portuguese were able to set up trading posts that were tied to ocean going ports having sophisticated vessels. They set the ports up to sell the same thing that the African trading posts were selling and that included slaves. They probably had qualms about it initially but when in Rome do as the Romans do. It is easy to convince humans immorality is ethical regardless of race. When the New World was discovered the slave ports were well established for over a century so it was not a far stretch for them to start supplying slaves to the Caribbean Islands where intensive labor in the Sugar plantations was required. The rest is history as they say. The takeaway is not that the Europeans engaged in slavery, they were both late to the game and actually less in amount than the Middle East and North African countries which engaged in high seas piracy to enslave merchant marines. This was one of the reasons for the War of the Barbary Pirates. Every culture has engaged in slavery, every single one. Anyone virtue signaling they are pure because muh ancestors were victims is either ill informed or obtuse. The takeaway that matters is Great Britain ended slavery in the modern world. No other country gets this title. In 1808 they outlawed slavery in Great Britain and in 1820 they outlawed slavery in every colony they held which well at that time the Sun Never set on the British Empire. They did more than this. They began actively interdicting know slave ships boarding them, bringing the slaves back to Africa and arresting the crew. They also began to directly assault the slave ports. In Brazil, in Suape the port is referred to as Porto de Galinhas which means Port of Chickens. So named tongue in cheek to represent the fact that the slave ships calling there would mislabel the slaves in their manifest as chickens to avoid the British from discovering their true cargo. In part the US owes the abolitionist movement to Great Britain, yes it was devout Christians and Quakers behind it but the true financial and press support was financed by the UK. During the war General Robert E Lee actually petitioned the Confederate Congress to abolish slavery so that they could win the support of the British Fleet in breaking blockades and with military support. The reason the English refused to help the south despite having a great economic incentive in the cotton and tobacco plantations there via trade was because of the issue of slavery. These "Anti-colonials" can point to excesses by Britain either real or perceived all they want but the reality is that without Great Britain and her empire the world would still be in the dark ages. There is really no argument you can make against this unless you ignore facts.
My question is why do not Islamic countries have to pay reparations. They were likely the worst slavers and their religion, interpreted form a certain point of view actually encouraged them to do it?
*Have a few pieces of chocolate during such episodes...you will feel better...(also good to forget someone after a break up...chocolate for a week every time you think of the person...you will be "cured")*
I like the idea of time based around the day/night cycle. Yeh I think having fixed length hours is useful for a lot of modern things but for general day to day life it'd be really nice to feel you know exactly when sunset is coming based on the hour rather than being baffled by it when we change the clocks twice a year and sunrise/sunset constantly moves around.
Amazing video linf! Your videos seems to only get better with time. @ linf, would you consider doing a Q and A video, or even a reaction video. both great ways of video ranking and attracting new subscribers.
Day hours were different from night hours in the West for most of history too. “Clock time” with its 24 consistent hours in a day-night cycle was originally treated as a crude approximation of the “real” Solar time, which changed with the seasons and could easily be tracked locally with a sundial. Mathematicians eventually found “The Equation of Time” which allowed you to directly convert back and forth from clock time to solar time, which made the clock time more prevalent-and complex “Equation Clocks” with custom geartrains to display that “real” Local Solar time if it was set for the proper date & latitude were a highly sought-after luxury. It was trains and specifically train timetables that made western countries adopt clock time as official national standards, and generations for common people to accept that as “real” time and the position of the sun in the sky as a “function” of time, not time itself. Also, the original Roman time system on which modern ones are based only had “hours” during daylight, and thus only 12 of them, with noon being the start of the 7th hour (counting from the 1st at sunrise and 12th just before sunset). After nightfall, time was counted instead by watches, of which there were only 4, due to time being much harder to approximate accurately and cheaply without the sun out.
Time keeping by various cultures and times, really had impact on our history. It is often taken for granted today, since almost everyone has a cellphone today, that keeps time so we don’t have too.
This is the first time I have seen one of your videos, I just want to say you have a lovely narrative voice and I think you would be well-suited for reading poetry. Try "The Night Before Christmas," your natural cadence and accent would fit that so so well
Pretty solid jokes. Well done. The Japanese clock system seems more complicated and variable but also holds more practical information. Daylight savings the Japanese way. Now, we are always asking about what time sunset is. I'm not sure how the 24 seasons would work out. I suppose it would force you to feel or think about the passing of time more frequently.
When i was in Tokyo i was confused that some stores are open until 25:00 😅 and first thought their days have 25hours but 25:00 just means 1:00 in the morning
Seing as the world (or well the US) is already struggling with different measurements of temperature (celsius vs fahrenheit) and lengths (meter/kilometer vs inch/mile) I don't think that's a good idea 😂
@@jamesharding3459 *US Customary units technically (funfact: US Customary units were officially standardized _before_ British Imperial Units), which are also technically defined in relation to the metric system. But in a mildly better world those units would be better adjusted to more cleanly fit the metric system (iirc China did something like that with it’s traditional units), giving us stuff like an inch being exactly 2.5cm (currently 2.54), and we’d have a perfect 30cm metric foot among other things.
Love your content man. Learn something fun and new each time. Since on a roll with the clocks, could I suggest one video topic that could be interesting? What about the history of Butai Karakuri? It does tie in kabuki/noh theatre with Takeda Omi.
One important information is missing, how did they keep time before European mechanical clocks? If the length of an hour changed every 2 weeks, how did they calculate that today an day hour was that much time? As they had to ring bell for the whole city they must have had some accurate way to calculate time somehow. What was it?
This whole time I had no idea that the Japanese had their own clocks and different way to tell time but now that I think about it makes sense that other culture in the past had their different ways of telling time. Time/clocks/watches is just things I took for granted. Just knew most modern cultures accepted the 24 hour standard. I noticed whenever the seasons change and I'm like it's only 6'oclock wtf is the sun, is when I really think about time.
One of the first town clocks installed in a ‘Viking’ village was torn off and thrown off the docks😂time isn’t so great when it lets your boss micromanage you
As other comments have observed European cultures also used to use variable length hours. While very useful for a largely agrarian society it quickly becomes unworkable in a society with trains, buses etc.. (at least pre-internet). You can't have a regular train schedule with variable length hours since the amount of time to travel a given distance is effectively fixed. Plus, once you have widespread use of artificial lighting and ppl largely work inside the benefit of fixed times for dawn and dusk is hugely reduced. The interesting thing is why Europeans adopted fixed hours before it made much sense to do so. Was it the monk's/catholic's fault having to do with prayer times or was this just borrowed from the middle east?
I mean western time isn't arbitrary. all the units of western time correspond with the larger units up to the day month and year thanks to Julius Caesar and the Julian calendar. and now the Gregorian calendar. even the Mayan units of time make mathematical sense to the calendar year. Japanese time seems arbitrary almost, how does it correspond with the seasons?
From a scientific and engineering perspective, its a good thing they switched. There are all sorts of reason why hours than shift like that isn't a good thing. It can be a pain to program in daylights savings time and that time shift happens only twice a year.
I think the calculation was probably easy because of modular arithmetic. Don't get me wrong it would still be a pain to have to rely on a calculation like that in your head, but you can learn to figure out the day of the week any date occured on because dates can only fall into 7 categories you can divide all of the dates into. So basically just by checking a couple remainders in your head you can do this and freak people out pretty easy. This is a pretty useless math trick, but if you treated how the minutes shift each day as the remainders you can drastically reduce the amount of calculations and make it possible for most people familiar with long division to convert these seemingly complicated time tables in their head. This is totally just a supposition, I just also know there's a lot of ancient math found in practice that the culture didn't always leave behind an algebraic/formulaic expression for.
So the japanese clocks dealt with daylights saving by rearranging the clocks multiple times a year...why not use the western version whilst using external markers to keep track of day hours? Now you know exactly when the day starts without expecting people to mental arithmetic nor mess with a clock.
I have a question about the figure at 5:59. Following the explanations in your video, midnight or European 0 o'clock is at midnight 9 of the Japanese way to tell the time. Then at Japanese 6 in the morning it's sunrise. So sunrise in this example is about 6.30 o'clock in the European way. So far so good. But following your explanations in this very interesting video, noon is at 9 again in the Japanese method, but in the European notation it's 12 o'clock at noon. So in this figure, noon at European 12 and Japanese 9 should be always in the same distance from midnight, as I learned from your video. But the Japanese hours between midnight and sunrise should be longer than those between sunrise and noon in this example, when sunrise is at around 6.30 o'clock. When sunrise is at 6 o'clock one Japanese hour is always 2 European hours. If sunrise is at 8 o'clock, 8 European hours from midnight to sunrise are 3 Japanese hours, so 1 Japanese hour at night equals 8/3 hours or or 2 hours 40 minutes. And the 3 Japanese hours from sunrise to noon should be 4 European hours, so one Japanese hour is 4/3 European hours or 1 hour 20 minutes. So between midnight and noon there are always 6 Japanese hours of different length and 12 European hours of same length. So, the right edges of the both scales, noon, should be in the same distance from the left edge, midnight, and the length of Japanese hours in this scale should change at sunrise, or 6, and the hours between 6 and noon should be shorter. But perhaps I didn't understand the video properly. 🤔 I would appreciate a reply a lot. Thanks in advance. Have a nice day 🖐👴
Oops you're right, that diagram is all sorts of wrong. I was focused on displaying the Japanese 9-7 conversion, and neglected the scale of the bar graphs. So yes, the left and right edges should match. And for the bottom bar, hours 6, 5, 4 should be shorter. Also the +2h4m conversion is for DAY hours. Therefore the left side of the graphs should be noon, and the right side midnight. I think I meant for the top bar to be PM hours and confused myself.
@@Linfamy Thanks for replying. I thought it's AM, because you wrote EU time on top, and Europe (I'm in Germany) doesn't use AM and PM ... perhaps the UK does, but they left the EU already... Additionally you started with 0 in the first scale, and the AM and PM notation doesn't know 0, they start either with 12 pm (12 o'clock) or 12 am (0 o'clock). So for me it looked like AM. Nevertheless, it doesn't matter if you mean Japanese day hours or night hours, because we just need to move 6 months in time, to get the other. Have a nice day 🖐👴
"hey Sakura, what time is it" "Time for you to stop being poor bitch" Edo period equivalent of "got so many rocks up on my watch can't tell what time it is"
Always felt Japan to be one of the most adaptable societies especially in the last couple hundred years. Maybe it has something to do with their embedded warrior caste ethic.
I wish we'd just agree on one universal time and then in some countries you eat lunch at 12(pm) in the middle of the day and in other countries you'd eat at 3(am)
Railroads made consistent time measurement more important. This is why we went from "local time" to time zones. I'd guess the same dynamic was working in Japan.
Also the advent of electric lighting made it less important/relevant to orient timekeeping around daylight hours. It allowed people to be productive regardless of whether the sun was up or not I think the shift happened for a number of reasons; like Linfamy said in the video, people were doing conversion math in their head for a long time before officially adopting the western timekeeping paradigm. I don't think railroad schedules would have been the biggest contributor, as they would likely be running on Japanese time anyway (unless owned/operated by a western company) Electric lighting, however, made enormous impacts to every culture across the world. Many different cultures (one could argue most throughout history) had far more relativistic timekeeping oriented around sunrise/sunset. Prior to mass electric lighting, the useful hours in a day were limited by how long the sun was in the sky. It makes much more sense to divide the useful hours of the day in to equal segments based on relative duration when you depend on the sun as your main light source With objective time measurement, you end up with things like daylight savings time; where during winter seasons people who don't live near the equator wake up in the dark, spend all their daylight hours working (usually inside), then finish their shift in the dark again lol
True, it is funny to think that different times existed between villages before the railway network. In England, until the 1840s, towns and villages designated clocktowers as designated time, going by when the sunlight reached certain parametres; down to fine art, meaning villages and towns within the same county were minutes behind each as you walked west, with echoing bell chimes in towns to the east acting as alarms for the bell ringers to ring their own bell with however many minutes time behind they were. It must have been so controversial and disruptive to people.
@@matthewlaurence3121 Anyone alive in the 1840s would have seen so much change during their lifetime that they probably kind of got used to it. Time zones weren't explicitly adopted by governments right away, though. It was a more gradual thing as people voluntarily adjusted their clocks so they could predict things like trains, telegraphs, etc. In rural areas away from train lines local time hung on longer.
My wife is from the country side. I remember visiting one time and heard someone outside banging wooden sticks. I asked what is he doing? She told me that it was the old style of telling people what time it is. The guy only appeared at dusk and dawn. Practically a human rooster.
I didn't know this one and wondered why this traditional Japanese time goes backward from nine to four, so I googled it. Those numbers represent the number of times you smack the bell to tell the time. Makes sense. Actually, two types of traditional Japanese time exist, and another one divides a day into 24 "hours," with each animal having two "hours," which change the time length throughout the year, as you explained. This one has a standard order of numbers, zero to 24. "草木も眠る丑三つ時(The hour of Cow Three, when even grass is asleep)" is a very famous phrase in Japan to express "in the dead of night" creepier.
Ok, it makes sense to hit the bell the amount of times as the hour, but for a 6 hour day and night, why start at 9 and go to 4? That I don't understand.
Reminds me of the Ethiopian time , which is pretty much the same with the difference of having 12 hours of day and 12 hours of night instead of 6 hours for each , but considering the proximity of Ethiopia to the equator it actually makes more sense.
Yeah, but like the Japanese way, it only works locally. I mean, I really hate to say it cuz the European way usually doesn’t work as well in other places of the world, but time is something that NEEDS to be standardized for any global systems to function properly. Latitude affects day length so significantly. Otherwise, I’m really diggin’ the Japanese way as I also live in a middle latitude.
Same in Tanzania, but the proximity to the equator meant the length of days/nights didn't vary all that much. Now they tie their clock to the western one, with Swahili spoken time always 6 hours off of the hours actually shown on the clock.
They had a similar idea in Medieval Europe, where the length of the hours was different during the day and the night, and at different times of the year, as the daylight hours got longer and shorter.
In fact, it's an idea that goes back to the Romans, where they had 24 hours, 12 hours for the day and 12 for the night. They also divided the night hours into 4 "vigils" for the idea that for a military encampment, guard duty would last for 3 "night hours". One can guess that while it must have been relatively nice in the summer season, the winter vigils would have been relatively irritating.
@@shami1kemi1 60 minutes an hour comes from the base 60 method (they also had base 12 for easier fractions, math in the head) the Sumerians had. They therefore also divided night and day in 12 parts. Eventually Sumer fell to Babylon (a few others were in between) and Babylonians ran with base 60 and divided the circle into 360°, where later Romans came along, "lent" some scholars (aka Operation Paperclip, the prequel) and the idea went to Rome. Thanks Alexander. When they figured out the earth was round they needed better than minutes, so they just divided the minute into... 60 again, for navigational purposes. Romans used it but were way late to the party, they raided the leftovers and ran with it.
@@jamegumb7298 You are talking about astronomical and navigational measurement used to determine location. First, the Ancients determined what their overhead sky looked like, then compared it to other locations and realized how the new location varied. The hours, minutes and seconds are degrees of arc related to horizon, zenith or reference point. Land based medieval time, Roman Catholic Church time for at least England and France before the era of mechanical clocks in the early 12th century was based on 12 hours of daytime. For the religious it was important to keep to the prayer schedule. The time was all local. Noon is when the Sun is as straight up as it gets in your location. This varies based on time of year and how far from the Equator you are. If you look at a sundial and think about it you will understand that the length of the shadows and the length of the hour change as the sun shifts position in the sky. A variety of flow rate based devices were used at night (Candles, hourglasses, water clocks, sand flow, burning cords, etc.). Right now, at 41° 34' 10.8444'' N, 71° 27' 40.1148'' W I'm only getting about 9' 30" of daylight and the Sun is at such a low angle it's annoying to drive even at 1pm. . On the 21st of June the daylength lasts a little under 15'14".
"A clock is a machine that is associated with modernity. It helps people not to be embarrassed by being late to an appointment." Boy, do Asians go hard on shame for compliance, don't they?
@@jasonblalock4429 this is from my own experience, so it should be taken with a grain of salt. In my experience, westerners use, or at least they try to, guilt in order to get compliance. My family certainly uses it, many of my friends and classmates always talked about how their parents and, in some cases, grandparents tried to guilt them into doing or not doing something.
Ah like when I lived in Japan and my girlfriends always had room for ice cream after dinner. Because apparently Japanese girls have a food stomach and an ice cream stomach. The Japanese are truly amazing creatures. On a serious note, I do find it interesting that they still keep the base system of 12 in their time keeping. That seems universal from the Sumerian source.
My grandmother (not Japanese, but Polish) called her capacity to eat dessert after filling up on the main meal her "hollow leg". I think it's not a Japanese thing.
@@Superabound2 They generally are. I think they just have the kind that is made with fats and oils and not with milk. I dont think most people know that a lot of ice cream isnt made with milk anymore.
If we talk about the topic of time, Greeks, from Christianisation onwards also used bells for measuring time, the church bell would ring as many times as the hour it reached
Greeks in Bactria(Afghanistan) and India converted to Mahayana Buddhism, which was the branch that would start taking root in China, Korea, and Japan... Rather the Greek convert population was directly involved in the process of bringing Buddhism to East Asia, as a direct result various Greek ideas spread into Buddhist communities as the Greek converts were not just passive participants in their own conversions. So it's not simply that a population of Classical Greeks converted to the same branch of Buddhism that first reached Japan. More specifically the branch that reached Japan and laid probably a solid half of their civilization's moral and intellectual foundations, came about as a direct result of the Greek conversion. Now this is not to imply that Greek culture had appreciably transmitted across the continents, these were converts on the edge of the known world highly progressed in the process of going native afterall, but what had happened was several key ideas of Greek thought had reduced down to their most basic essences and, along with some of their motifs, transited with their intellectual (and in some cases biological) descendants. And Mahayana Buddhism would persist in Japan along side later movements in the faith instead of being overwritten by them as they were in China, Korea, and Indochina. So what's the significance of this? That's the thing. We don't really know.... But there are odd parallels between Japanese Mythology and Greek Mythology... And there were differences in how the Japanese approached the Europeans versus how the rest of Asia did, which repeatedly paid off.
This was a really interesting and insightful look into the traditional Japanese time system and how it was changed to the 24-hours-a-day system. One might say that this video is... worth your time. Yes, I really wanted to make this pun xD
It makes sense too, to divide day and night hours prior to clocks, since the way you measure day and night hours is different as well. Sun dial vs movement of the stars. (Which I assume the Japanese used since the chinese did) Plus i do find myself looking up what time sunset is often, would be convenient if it was already build into a time system.
You know what's more hardcore than using a clock? USING A COCK!!!! But in all seriousness, in traditional Ukrainian understanding of time rooster calls were used as a measurement First rooster - approximately 10 p.m. Second rooster - approximately midnight Third rooster - approximately 2 a.m. It was considered, that rooster calls are not only sufficient measurement system, but it was also symbolic - night was believed the time when all kinds of evil spirits are in full power and roosters were thought to possess the power to weaken the evil and wicked, with the last rooster call evil had no power over an honest Christian folks any longer and was considered banished for now
@@Linfamy We may never know, since there's a big possibility, that all this system was metaphorical and the hours were not the same, since there was supposed to be a precise timing between the third rooster and the morning star
@@Linfamy Again, a lot of it has to do with rooster being seen as creatures capable of dispelling evil spirits and night being seen as the wicked hour.
@@СофіяФедюк-ш3т that reminds me of the passage in the Bible, when in the night before his death, Jesus tells his disciple Petrus that he would deny any connection to his master, before the rooster had cried three times. Petrus is adamant that he would not do that, yet when people recognize him, he replies with 'I am not one of these, I have no idea how you came to believe this' three times. Jesus comes back from the court, the rooster cries a third time, and the Master looks at his follower with a sad expression, because he had been right. So the bird turns not only into a herald of the coming light, but also of the truth, and thus became the enemy of all thing that are wrong, especially in a spritiual way.
You said European hours were different for night and day until the 1700's, then you said the European clocks in the 1500's they brought to Japan had 24 equal hours. I assume different parts of Europe had different systems?
In case you are wondering why unequal hours, think that before electric light there was little to do without sunlight. So your actual useful day would be shorter in winter than in summer. Regular hours make a lot more sense when you start thinking about precise astronomical observations, like the ones that give you an estimate of the longitude of a ship in the middle of the ocean (European navies spent fortunes trying to improve their clocks/chronometers). So it is not strange that they were favored by the Europeans.
I didn't even know anything about Japanese history before I started watching, but since then this has been my absolute favorite channel. Really interesting obscure history and supur humor to boot, all tied together with a pleasing art style
There's a video somewhere here where they made a hand-crafted watch that shows both the current time and the traditional Japanese time, which also updates the Japanese hours automatically if you remember to keep the date set up correctly.
Humans will literally learn astronomy and do head calculationa every time they need to check their clocks just for the opportunity to flex their wealth on cousin bobunaga
In Sundanese too. Well. I saw human centered to their body responses before the time zones being agreed. The circadian effect of the body by their environtment changes. It's just another logic. Like how you see geospatial before GPS. 😁
The variable system (I would say Japanese, but it is almost universal) makes more sense but the globalised world does need a common time system to function.
It makes more sense in an agrarian society where work is done outside in the sun. Once you need train/bus time tables and ppl travel for multiple appointments it becomes very unwieldy because the train schedule and travel times now vary on a daily basis and once ppl work in artificial light keeping a fixed time for dawn and dusk isn't helpful. It's same reason why trains introduced a single time and time zones (which I guess is your point about globalization...though it applies even inside a country).
It would definitely be a feature to have dusk and dawn displayed on clocks and watches. Would be easy to implement on smart watches. Perhaps already exists.
Certain things were known around the world but how they deal with those numbers makes total sense to them and the needs when the systems were established, then some dude shows up in a boat and starts drawing a different picture from all the same elements you were using. That has to be a wild experience.
Came to hear about traditional Japanese time measurement. Subscribed, when hearing "Oh, is it 8 o'clock already?" "No, Genji's just beating his kids again." *chef's kiss*
Ayy thank you for the follow-up video, as always very interesting; now to remind myself to not info dump this all on my fiancee who would politely listen while discreetly looking at her fancy Western style watch that shows NO regard for when sunrise is.
Roman time was also variable with the hour and night divided into equal segments but the duration varied on the season. A daylight hour in summer was longer than one in winter. This was mosh true in Europe as well until the invention of clocks. When you used sundials the hours varied
I don't know how, but I'm sure The Fujiwaras marrying their daughters into power caused this change too. I'm sure of it! Jokes aside, great video as always.
After I saw the documentation of the 万年自鳴鐘 Mannen Jimeishou at NHK I remember that a independent Japanese watch maker build a wristwatch alone by hand with shifting time markers. Like the Mannen Jimeishou. People should watch the NHK documentation of the watch where also the position of the Sun and moon was replicated according to the day in the year. This is actually the thumbnail pictures of the video.
Well, modern Japanese time is also a bit different. I’m Japanese and am always confused 0:30pm doesn’t exist in other countries but they use 12:30pm instead.
Well yeah the 12h vs 24h devide is pretty weird. In Germany we also use 24 hours and not the am/pm time, although in casual conversation we do use 12hour format. I think even most countries do it that way.
If you measure time by the course of the sun, it makes sense to have hours with varying lengths, that will just follow the course of the seasons. If you measure time with a mechanical device, it is a lot easier to have time flow consistently. When this change happened, people must have been very upset and confused, that suddenly the hour, on which the day starts (e.g. sun comes up) should be a little different every day. Our current system is a lot less intuitive, if you think about it.
We should really return to the old system. Nobody should work as hard in winter as they do in summer. Yeah, the pay is less, but it evens out year-round. Plus, it will make waking up and going to bed a lot more sensible.
I remember watching a chinese movie, don't remember which one, and during the start of the movie when had the peaceful part had a guy walking through the mansion/castle ringing a gong and say "Is the hour of X animal of the chinese zodiac" and seeing the japanese clock thing made me remember of that scenes.
Having to mentally convert two competing systems is a familiar skill you have to pick up if you live in the UK or Canada, where the imperial system is still pervasive in many things, but metric is the official standard.
![[UA] Eternal Fire проти NAVI | EPL Season 20 Malta](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/chvlsDygrZM/mqdefault.jpg)
"European accustomed to disequality", and shows a picture of a slavist ship.
Europe was indeed a land of inequality MEANING nobles owned everything, and people nothing, a feudal sistem imported from the barbarians from east (Rome was a res publica).
Regarding SLAVERY (a truly comptemptible thing) was NOT a european phenomenon, doesnt matter how strong idiotic, false, woke cancel-culture tries.
There was extensive use of slaves in Egypt millennia before Europe was even a thing.
Egypt is in Africa, not in Europe.
Slavery was diffused in all Africa, actually, and was practiced between different tribes.
Then the concept passed to the phoenicians, the greeks and eventually the romans, that however used to pay wages to their workforce, and free deserving slaves. In these cruent times, a fair treatment.
Point out that yes, westerners used slavery until 19th century (before the abolition).
Many easterners and southerners still treat their citizens far worse than slaves, still today.
Want to talk inequality? Try women in Iran, or Uighurs in China, or anyone but Kim Jong Un in Korea.
Or incur in the wrath of all those, sick of woke rethoric and cancel culture, that will stop your interesting video and hit the thumb down.
Equalling Europe with slavery is an historical false, and by the way the black african amazon portaited by super woke Viola were actually capturing slaves, not fighting for freedom.
Because THIS IS WHAT HAPPENED.
I appreciate the well thought out comment, so I'll respond :)
Perhaps you are reading too much into a throwaway joke?
Slavery was common in all parts of the world. Saying "Europe had slaves" does not mean "ONLY Europe had slaves." Like when I joked about the Japanese beating their kids, I didn't mean Japan was the only culture that did.
Also, talking about how Europe engaged in slavery in the past says nothing about modern Europeans, so bringing up the wrongs of China or other non-European countries in the modern day is irrelevant.
I'm not going around comparing the East to West, trying to gauge which was better over their entire history. I don't care to compare cultures like that, seems kinda weird.
Sometimes I just want to make a joke without giving 10 caveats about how "these other people do it too." Seems a bit snowflakey to expect that. In fact it makes me want to joke about it more to trigger the haters lol
I joke about Japan all the time in past videos, AND this one. Imagine if I had to qualify every time that "non-japanese do it too."
You're free to disagree, but at least you understand where I'm coming from :)
TL;DR Saying "Europe had slaves" does not mean "ONLY Europe had slaves." Chill.
@@Linfamy An unbearable overdose of rabid woke people triggered anything is being said, probably, lowered my tolerance for jokes about europeans.
You know, if you make a joke about black people saying they are unwashed (stupid stereotype) there is an uproar.
Bashing europeans, ok, nobody says a thing. I am against racism, against privilege, against power without balance . So you know as well who I am, a honest libertarian. These days europeans are demonized like jews were demonized by the nazis, or americans in NK.
At a certain point, it ceases to be funny. Europe has a dirty conscience, yes, but virtually any technical, scientific, artistic, political advancement of mankind, in the past four centuries, basically sprouted from the old continent, in particular about civil right for people of all races.
I don't talk with wokes, I have commented your (interesting) video because I sensed the good faith and some brilliancy.
Just wanted to point out that enough is enough, and Europe=slavery is simply untrue, and repeating this prejudice reinforces a sick narrative.
Couldnt like the video, but liked your mannered, intelligent, well placed reply. One of the thumbs up there is mine. Take care.
Generally Europeans are blamed for slavery in western nations. They get the most scrutiny and criticism about it. This treatment itself is unequal and becomes tiring and has become dangerous.
The Godfather of the Modern African/European/New World Slave trade was Mansa Musa. Musa, Mansa is not a name but a title, was the king of the empire of Mali. He was a black Islamic dictator who was also the richest single person ever to live and that includes anyone alive today. His total net wealth in real US dollars today is estimated at easily 400 billion dollars. Mali was blessed with abundant gold mines that were easy to mine and harvest. This is how Musa got his seed money but what made him insanely wealthy was the slave trade. Musa set up trading posts throughout Africa to supply the need which was more brutal than anything in the Americas, either continent to come. The main call for slaves was to supply labor for the Saharan trade routes to the middle east.
Musa being a good Muslim went on his pilgrimage to Mecca and as good Muslims do he gave out money and treasure to those who crossed his path. Musa's pocket change was so rich that he actually doubled the net GDP of every town and village his caravan passed through. As one would expect word of this travelled and the Portuguese heard about it. They came sailing down the west coast of Africa looking for Gold. They found a niche market that Musa could not compete with. The African West Coast was not conducive to safe ports being rocky and high cliffs and so the Africans never developed a sophisticated shipping industry. Thus the Portuguese were able to set up trading posts that were tied to ocean going ports having sophisticated vessels. They set the ports up to sell the same thing that the African trading posts were selling and that included slaves. They probably had qualms about it initially but when in Rome do as the Romans do. It is easy to convince humans immorality is ethical regardless of race.
When the New World was discovered the slave ports were well established for over a century so it was not a far stretch for them to start supplying slaves to the Caribbean Islands where intensive labor in the Sugar plantations was required. The rest is history as they say.
The takeaway is not that the Europeans engaged in slavery, they were both late to the game and actually less in amount than the Middle East and North African countries which engaged in high seas piracy to enslave merchant marines. This was one of the reasons for the War of the Barbary Pirates. Every culture has engaged in slavery, every single one. Anyone virtue signaling they are pure because muh ancestors were victims is either ill informed or obtuse. The takeaway that matters is
Great Britain ended slavery in the modern world. No other country gets this title. In 1808 they outlawed slavery in Great Britain and in 1820 they outlawed slavery in every colony they held which well at that time the Sun Never set on the British Empire. They did more than this. They began actively interdicting know slave ships boarding them, bringing the slaves back to Africa and arresting the crew. They also began to directly assault the slave ports. In Brazil, in Suape the port is referred to as Porto de Galinhas which means Port of Chickens. So named tongue in cheek to represent the fact that the slave ships calling there would mislabel the slaves in their manifest as chickens to avoid the British from discovering their true cargo.
In part the US owes the abolitionist movement to Great Britain, yes it was devout Christians and Quakers behind it but the true financial and press support was financed by the UK. During the war General Robert E Lee actually petitioned the Confederate Congress to abolish slavery so that they could win the support of the British Fleet in breaking blockades and with military support. The reason the English refused to help the south despite having a great economic incentive in the cotton and tobacco plantations there via trade was because of the issue of slavery.
These "Anti-colonials" can point to excesses by Britain either real or perceived all they want but the reality is that without Great Britain and her empire the world would still be in the dark ages. There is really no argument you can make against this unless you ignore facts.
My question is why do not Islamic countries have to pay reparations. They were likely the worst slavers and their religion, interpreted form a certain point of view actually encouraged them to do it?
"Oh, is it 8 o'clock already?"
"No, Genji's just beating his kids again."
That joke is as dark as those kid's bruises lol.
Wrong...so wrong 😅🤣
I laughed but I hate myself for laughing
Daylight saving time
No mommy don’t do it again. I will be a good girl mommy. You are hurting me.
Perfect timing 😍
;)
Right? :DDD
Punny
That's phunny.
Getting home from work at 4pm and it’s already starting to get dark in winter makes me depressy so the Japanese system actually works better imo
*Have a few pieces of chocolate during such episodes...you will feel better...(also good to forget someone after a break up...chocolate for a week every time you think of the person...you will be "cured")*
Don't move to Scandinavia. The last of November, getting about 5 hours of light,at solstice it will be a little more than 3 hours.
Let's switch back to old Japanese time
This is sooo interesting! I would’ve never know this without your videos. Thank you 💕
I like the idea of time based around the day/night cycle.
Yeh I think having fixed length hours is useful for a lot of modern things but for general day to day life it'd be really nice to feel you know exactly when sunset is coming based on the hour rather than being baffled by it when we change the clocks twice a year and sunrise/sunset constantly moves around.
“The little tab that stops the aluminum foil from rolling around while you’re trying to tear it off.”
I’m sorry, THE WHAT
Ikr???
More time stuff, just because.
Also, looking for Christmas gifts? linfamy.creator-spring.com
Amazing video linf! Your videos seems to only get better with time. @ linf, would you consider doing a Q and A video, or even a reaction video. both great ways of video ranking and attracting new subscribers.
Why is the ordering on the clocks so weird?
Japanese time mad calcs might compare in madness to all the coin and bits of specie used in under the British Crown. Can't recall what a groat was.
@@1337w0n What was wierd?
@@parrotshootist3004 they start at 6 instead of 1 or 0.
Day hours were different from night hours in the West for most of history too. “Clock time” with its 24 consistent hours in a day-night cycle was originally treated as a crude approximation of the “real” Solar time, which changed with the seasons and could easily be tracked locally with a sundial. Mathematicians eventually found “The Equation of Time” which allowed you to directly convert back and forth from clock time to solar time, which made the clock time more prevalent-and complex “Equation Clocks” with custom geartrains to display that “real” Local Solar time if it was set for the proper date & latitude were a highly sought-after luxury.
It was trains and specifically train timetables that made western countries adopt clock time as official national standards, and generations for common people to accept that as “real” time and the position of the sun in the sky as a “function” of time, not time itself.
Also, the original Roman time system on which modern ones are based only had “hours” during daylight, and thus only 12 of them, with noon being the start of the 7th hour (counting from the 1st at sunrise and 12th just before sunset). After nightfall, time was counted instead by watches, of which there were only 4, due to time being much harder to approximate accurately and cheaply without the sun out.
Time keeping by various cultures and times, really had impact on our history. It is often taken for granted today, since almost everyone has a cellphone today, that keeps time so we don’t have too.
This is the first time I have seen one of your videos, I just want to say you have a lovely narrative voice and I think you would be well-suited for reading poetry. Try "The Night Before Christmas," your natural cadence and accent would fit that so so well
Pretty solid jokes. Well done. The Japanese clock system seems more complicated and variable but also holds more practical information. Daylight savings the Japanese way. Now, we are always asking about what time sunset is. I'm not sure how the 24 seasons would work out. I suppose it would force you to feel or think about the passing of time more frequently.
WAIT!! Have those tabs been there all along to keep foil from moving???!!?! Why am I just now learning this??!?!!?
;)
I imagine it came about something like "Early morning, middle morning, late morning" all around the day making 12 varying hours.
3:15 "oh Is it 8 o'clock already?" "No Genjis just beating his kids again🙄" 💀💀💀💀
I laughed a little too hard at "Europeans being used to unequal things" thank you for putting a smile on my face
When i was in Tokyo i was confused that some stores are open until 25:00 😅 and first thought their days have 25hours but 25:00 just means 1:00 in the morning
The old system was efficient... until people started to work even after dark.
While I'm glad to have hours of uniform length (I'm a coward, sorry) I am genuinely angry we don't have animal-based units of time.
Petition to rename the hours after animals. 👍
@@kme Signed
Would be so cool if Japan decided to still keep it’s own system and to this day had a different time system from everyone else’s lol.
Seing as the world (or well the US) is already struggling with different measurements of temperature (celsius vs fahrenheit) and lengths (meter/kilometer vs inch/mile) I don't think that's a good idea 😂
@@clarimm6675 The US already uses metric for science, engineering, medicine, etc.
We just label a few things in Imperial because idiots are stubborn.
@@jamesharding3459 Oh I didn't know that, thank you! Ah well old habits die hard lol
@@jamesharding3459 *US Customary units technically (funfact: US Customary units were officially standardized _before_ British Imperial Units), which are also technically defined in relation to the metric system.
But in a mildly better world those units would be better adjusted to more cleanly fit the metric system (iirc China did something like that with it’s traditional units), giving us stuff like an inch being exactly 2.5cm (currently 2.54), and we’d have a perfect 30cm metric foot among other things.
This is not a Japanese system but rather Chinese one called twelve Shi Chen ja.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%8D%81%E4%BA%8C%E6%99%82%E8%BE%B0
Love your content man. Learn something fun and new each time.
Since on a roll with the clocks, could I suggest one video topic that could be interesting? What about the history of Butai Karakuri? It does tie in kabuki/noh theatre with Takeda Omi.
One important information is missing, how did they keep time before European mechanical clocks? If the length of an hour changed every 2 weeks, how did they calculate that today an day hour was that much time? As they had to ring bell for the whole city they must have had some accurate way to calculate time somehow. What was it?
This whole time I had no idea that the Japanese had their own clocks and different way to tell time but now that I think about it makes sense that other culture in the past had their different ways of telling time. Time/clocks/watches is just things I took for granted. Just knew most modern cultures accepted the 24 hour standard. I noticed whenever the seasons change and I'm like it's only 6'oclock wtf is the sun, is when I really think about time.
so no one is gonna talk about the fresh prince reference?
Sooooooo interesting!!!!!
Thanks ;)
5:05 this killed me, i am dead now.
Ohhh, someone went to Matsumoto and got awesome pics for this one ^__^
Admittedly the japanese style mechanical clocks sound hella complicated, 24 (x 2 for night) different gears depending on season maybe
I kinda want to use this time system. It has an odd natural feel to it. Maybe they understood time dilation better than we thought.
One of the first town clocks installed in a ‘Viking’ village was torn off and thrown off the docks😂time isn’t so great when it lets your boss micromanage you
"Time to stop being poor, bitch" made me lol
As other comments have observed European cultures also used to use variable length hours. While very useful for a largely agrarian society it quickly becomes unworkable in a society with trains, buses etc.. (at least pre-internet). You can't have a regular train schedule with variable length hours since the amount of time to travel a given distance is effectively fixed. Plus, once you have widespread use of artificial lighting and ppl largely work inside the benefit of fixed times for dawn and dusk is hugely reduced.
The interesting thing is why Europeans adopted fixed hours before it made much sense to do so. Was it the monk's/catholic's fault having to do with prayer times or was this just borrowed from the middle east?
I mean western time isn't arbitrary. all the units of western time correspond with the larger units up to the day month and year thanks to Julius Caesar and the Julian calendar. and now the Gregorian calendar. even the Mayan units of time make mathematical sense to the calendar year. Japanese time seems arbitrary almost, how does it correspond with the seasons?
From a scientific and engineering perspective, its a good thing they switched. There are all sorts of reason why hours than shift like that isn't a good thing. It can be a pain to program in daylights savings time and that time shift happens only twice a year.
Do a vid on metric time.
idk what it is but i like how you pronounce the word 'clock'.
Clock
I think the calculation was probably easy because of modular arithmetic. Don't get me wrong it would still be a pain to have to rely on a calculation like that in your head, but you can learn to figure out the day of the week any date occured on because dates can only fall into 7 categories you can divide all of the dates into. So basically just by checking a couple remainders in your head you can do this and freak people out pretty easy. This is a pretty useless math trick, but if you treated how the minutes shift each day as the remainders you can drastically reduce the amount of calculations and make it possible for most people familiar with long division to convert these seemingly complicated time tables in their head. This is totally just a supposition, I just also know there's a lot of ancient math found in practice that the culture didn't always leave behind an algebraic/formulaic expression for.
Now if Seiko made watches telling Japanese time, that would be interesting, and collectable.
They did.
Honestly the fact that we have to look up when sunset and sunrise is wack as heck. I want a Japanese clock option.
"So u r probably not asian" 🤣🤣🤣🤣
24 seasons???
So that's 24 seasons of an average 15 days each and 5 days to work out how long the candles will actually burn for.
This made me appreciate Elden Ring even more 🤩🕑
(And dying light 1 but ER has many references into japanese culture so i guess was deliberately)
I am a physics teacher, and I almost need to scream to my students to not use the calculator...
No joke this is how i thought daylight savings worked till i was like 12, it never occurrd to me that you could shift middnight an hour forward
So the japanese clocks dealt with daylights saving by rearranging the clocks multiple times a year...why not use the western version whilst using external markers to keep track of day hours? Now you know exactly when the day starts without expecting people to mental arithmetic nor mess with a clock.
4:52 I even see a big black clock there!
I have a question about the figure at 5:59. Following the explanations in your video, midnight or European 0 o'clock is at midnight 9 of the Japanese way to tell the time.
Then at Japanese 6 in the morning it's sunrise. So sunrise in this example is about 6.30 o'clock in the European way.
So far so good.
But following your explanations in this very interesting video, noon is at 9 again in the Japanese method, but in the European notation it's 12 o'clock at noon.
So in this figure, noon at European 12 and Japanese 9 should be always in the same distance from midnight, as I learned from your video.
But the Japanese hours between midnight and sunrise should be longer than those between sunrise and noon in this example, when sunrise is at around 6.30 o'clock.
When sunrise is at 6 o'clock one Japanese hour is always 2 European hours. If sunrise is at 8 o'clock, 8 European hours from midnight to sunrise are 3 Japanese hours, so 1 Japanese hour at night equals 8/3 hours or or 2 hours 40 minutes. And the 3 Japanese hours from sunrise to noon should be 4 European hours, so one Japanese hour is 4/3 European hours or 1 hour 20 minutes.
So between midnight and noon there are always 6 Japanese hours of different length and 12 European hours of same length.
So, the right edges of the both scales, noon, should be in the same distance from the left edge, midnight, and the length of Japanese hours in this scale should change at sunrise, or 6, and the hours between 6 and noon should be shorter.
But perhaps I didn't understand the video properly. 🤔
I would appreciate a reply a lot. Thanks in advance.
Have a nice day 🖐👴
Oops you're right, that diagram is all sorts of wrong. I was focused on displaying the Japanese 9-7 conversion, and neglected the scale of the bar graphs.
So yes, the left and right edges should match. And for the bottom bar, hours 6, 5, 4 should be shorter.
Also the +2h4m conversion is for DAY hours. Therefore the left side of the graphs should be noon, and the right side midnight. I think I meant for the top bar to be PM hours and confused myself.
@@Linfamy
Thanks for replying.
I thought it's AM, because you wrote EU time on top, and Europe (I'm in Germany) doesn't use AM and PM ... perhaps the UK does, but they left the EU already...
Additionally you started with 0 in the first scale, and the AM and PM notation doesn't know 0, they start either with 12 pm (12 o'clock) or 12 am (0 o'clock). So for me it looked like AM.
Nevertheless, it doesn't matter if you mean Japanese day hours or night hours, because we just need to move 6 months in time, to get the other.
Have a nice day 🖐👴
I wonder why 1,2 and 3 weren't used in time in Japan during that era
"hey Sakura, what time is it"
"Time for you to stop being poor bitch"
Edo period equivalent of "got so many rocks up on my watch can't tell what time it is"
Always felt Japan to be one of the most adaptable societies especially in the last couple hundred years. Maybe it has something to do with their embedded warrior caste ethic.
So why count from 9? Anyone know what was that all about? (Sorry if this was already answered. I didn't see it mentioned below.)
How did they know how long night hours were supposed to be?
I wish we'd just agree on one universal time and then in some countries you eat lunch at 12(pm) in the middle of the day and in other countries you'd eat at 3(am)
Railroads made consistent time measurement more important. This is why we went from "local time" to time zones. I'd guess the same dynamic was working in Japan.
Also the advent of electric lighting made it less important/relevant to orient timekeeping around daylight hours. It allowed people to be productive regardless of whether the sun was up or not
I think the shift happened for a number of reasons; like Linfamy said in the video, people were doing conversion math in their head for a long time before officially adopting the western timekeeping paradigm. I don't think railroad schedules would have been the biggest contributor, as they would likely be running on Japanese time anyway (unless owned/operated by a western company)
Electric lighting, however, made enormous impacts to every culture across the world. Many different cultures (one could argue most throughout history) had far more relativistic timekeeping oriented around sunrise/sunset. Prior to mass electric lighting, the useful hours in a day were limited by how long the sun was in the sky. It makes much more sense to divide the useful hours of the day in to equal segments based on relative duration when you depend on the sun as your main light source
With objective time measurement, you end up with things like daylight savings time; where during winter seasons people who don't live near the equator wake up in the dark, spend all their daylight hours working (usually inside), then finish their shift in the dark again lol
@@benjii_boi *The Brits introduced and operated for a while trains in Japan...*
True, it is funny to think that different times existed between villages before the railway network. In England, until the 1840s, towns and villages designated clocktowers as designated time, going by when the sunlight reached certain parametres; down to fine art, meaning villages and towns within the same county were minutes behind each as you walked west, with echoing bell chimes in towns to the east acting as alarms for the bell ringers to ring their own bell with however many minutes time behind they were.
It must have been so controversial and disruptive to people.
@@matthewlaurence3121 Anyone alive in the 1840s would have seen so much change during their lifetime that they probably kind of got used to it. Time zones weren't explicitly adopted by governments right away, though. It was a more gradual thing as people voluntarily adjusted their clocks so they could predict things like trains, telegraphs, etc. In rural areas away from train lines local time hung on longer.
@@benjii_boi Bring back sundials ! Makes mores sense !
My wife is from the country side. I remember visiting one time and heard someone outside banging wooden sticks. I asked what is he doing? She told me that it was the old style of telling people what time it is. The guy only appeared at dusk and dawn. Practically a human rooster.
I didn't know this one and wondered why this traditional Japanese time goes backward from nine to four, so I googled it. Those numbers represent the number of times you smack the bell to tell the time. Makes sense.
Actually, two types of traditional Japanese time exist, and another one divides a day into 24 "hours," with each animal having two "hours," which change the time length throughout the year, as you explained. This one has a standard order of numbers, zero to 24. "草木も眠る丑三つ時(The hour of Cow Three, when even grass is asleep)" is a very famous phrase in Japan to express "in the dead of night" creepier.
Ok, it makes sense to hit the bell the amount of times as the hour, but for a 6 hour day and night, why start at 9 and go to 4? That I don't understand.
@@lotgc If you mainly want to know when twelve o'clock is, the increase of smacking four to nine makes it easy to notice. That's my guess.
1, 2, and 3 rings were reserved for temple prayer bells
@@Linfamy So numbers of rings were equal to the radio bands in those days. Interesting.
@@tykep1009 makes sense when you think of it from a large group practical organising way.
Reminds me of the Ethiopian time , which is pretty much the same with the difference of having 12 hours of day and 12 hours of night instead of 6 hours for each , but considering the proximity of Ethiopia to the equator it actually makes more sense.
Yeah, but like the Japanese way, it only works locally. I mean, I really hate to say it cuz the European way usually doesn’t work as well in other places of the world, but time is something that NEEDS to be standardized for any global systems to function properly. Latitude affects day length so significantly. Otherwise, I’m really diggin’ the Japanese way as I also live in a middle latitude.
Same in Tanzania, but the proximity to the equator meant the length of days/nights didn't vary all that much. Now they tie their clock to the western one, with Swahili spoken time always 6 hours off of the hours actually shown on the clock.
They had a similar idea in Medieval Europe, where the length of the hours was different during the day and the night, and at different times of the year, as the daylight hours got longer and shorter.
In fact, it's an idea that goes back to the Romans, where they had 24 hours, 12 hours for the day and 12 for the night.
They also divided the night hours into 4 "vigils" for the idea that for a military encampment, guard duty would last for 3 "night hours". One can guess that while it must have been relatively nice in the summer season, the winter vigils would have been relatively irritating.
@@shami1kemi1 60 minutes an hour comes from the base 60 method (they also had base 12 for easier fractions, math in the head) the Sumerians had. They therefore also divided night and day in 12 parts.
Eventually Sumer fell to Babylon (a few others were in between) and Babylonians ran with base 60 and divided the circle into 360°, where later Romans came along, "lent" some scholars (aka Operation Paperclip, the prequel) and the idea went to Rome. Thanks Alexander.
When they figured out the earth was round they needed better than minutes, so they just divided the minute into... 60 again, for navigational purposes.
Romans used it but were way late to the party, they raided the leftovers and ran with it.
@@jamegumb7298 You are talking about astronomical and navigational measurement used to determine location. First, the Ancients determined what their overhead sky looked like, then compared it to other locations and realized how the new location varied. The hours, minutes and seconds are degrees of arc related to horizon, zenith or reference point. Land based medieval time, Roman Catholic Church time for at least England and France before the era of mechanical clocks in the early 12th century was based on 12 hours of daytime. For the religious it was important to keep to the prayer schedule. The time was all local. Noon is when the Sun is as straight up as it gets in your location. This varies based on time of year and how far from the Equator you are. If you look at a sundial and think about it you will understand that the length of the shadows and the length of the hour change as the sun shifts position in the sky. A variety of flow rate based devices were used at night (Candles, hourglasses, water clocks, sand flow, burning cords, etc.). Right now, at 41° 34' 10.8444'' N, 71° 27' 40.1148'' W I'm only getting about 9' 30" of daylight and the Sun is at such a low angle it's annoying to drive even at 1pm. . On the 21st of June the daylength lasts a little under 15'14".
It is autamatically done with sundials, at least when the sun shines.
"A clock is a machine that is associated with modernity. It helps people not to be embarrassed by being late to an appointment." Boy, do Asians go hard on shame for compliance, don't they?
🥲
In China they do the same, but now including violence.
Eh, I think that's pretty universal. Shaming is one of the most common tactics for advertisements in general, certainly in the west.
@@jasonblalock4429 this is from my own experience, so it should be taken with a grain of salt. In my experience, westerners use, or at least they try to, guilt in order to get compliance. My family certainly uses it, many of my friends and classmates always talked about how their parents and, in some cases, grandparents tried to guilt them into doing or not doing something.
@@CalebCalixFernandez Yeah Shame and Guilt are 2 different emotions
Ah like when I lived in Japan and my girlfriends always had room for ice cream after dinner. Because apparently Japanese girls have a food stomach and an ice cream stomach. The Japanese are truly amazing creatures.
On a serious note, I do find it interesting that they still keep the base system of 12 in their time keeping. That seems universal from the Sumerian source.
TBH ice cream doesn't really fill you up unless you're binging loads of it.
Lolz
My grandmother (not Japanese, but Polish) called her capacity to eat dessert after filling up on the main meal her "hollow leg". I think it's not a Japanese thing.
I thought Japanese people were lactose intolerant?
@@Superabound2 They generally are. I think they just have the kind that is made with fats and oils and not with milk. I dont think most people know that a lot of ice cream isnt made with milk anymore.
"Westaboos" seriously needs to become a real term.
First-time watcher. Think I'll hang around a while. I like your style!
Oh great! Now I’ll have yet another thing to research for my Greek and Japanese Mythology based story! Thanks, Linfamy!
;)
If we talk about the topic of time, Greeks, from Christianisation onwards also used bells for measuring time, the church bell would ring as many times as the hour it reached
Greeks in Bactria(Afghanistan) and India converted to Mahayana Buddhism, which was the branch that would start taking root in China, Korea, and Japan... Rather the Greek convert population was directly involved in the process of bringing Buddhism to East Asia, as a direct result various Greek ideas spread into Buddhist communities as the Greek converts were not just passive participants in their own conversions. So it's not simply that a population of Classical Greeks converted to the same branch of Buddhism that first reached Japan. More specifically the branch that reached Japan and laid probably a solid half of their civilization's moral and intellectual foundations, came about as a direct result of the Greek conversion. Now this is not to imply that Greek culture had appreciably transmitted across the continents, these were converts on the edge of the known world highly progressed in the process of going native afterall, but what had happened was several key ideas of Greek thought had reduced down to their most basic essences and, along with some of their motifs, transited with their intellectual (and in some cases biological) descendants. And Mahayana Buddhism would persist in Japan along side later movements in the faith instead of being overwritten by them as they were in China, Korea, and Indochina.
So what's the significance of this? That's the thing. We don't really know.... But there are odd parallels between Japanese Mythology and Greek Mythology... And there were differences in how the Japanese approached the Europeans versus how the rest of Asia did, which repeatedly paid off.
This was a really interesting and insightful look into the traditional Japanese time system and how it was changed to the 24-hours-a-day system. One might say that this video is... worth your time.
Yes, I really wanted to make this pun xD
it makes perfect sense when you consider the fact that back then nighttime was this phenomenon where everyone went blind, and no work could be done.
Having seen all of your Japan videos I learned (aside the Fujiwara stuff) that Tyler was a very popular name.
This is true..
It makes sense too, to divide day and night hours prior to clocks, since the way you measure day and night hours is different as well. Sun dial vs movement of the stars. (Which I assume the Japanese used since the chinese did)
Plus i do find myself looking up what time sunset is often, would be convenient if it was already build into a time system.
What time is it? Time to hit the LIKE button.
You know what's more hardcore than using a clock? USING A COCK!!!!
But in all seriousness, in traditional Ukrainian understanding of time rooster calls were used as a measurement
First rooster - approximately 10 p.m.
Second rooster - approximately midnight
Third rooster - approximately 2 a.m.
It was considered, that rooster calls are not only sufficient measurement system, but it was also symbolic - night was believed the time when all kinds of evil spirits are in full power and roosters were thought to possess the power to weaken the evil and wicked, with the last rooster call evil had no power over an honest Christian folks any longer and was considered banished for now
Wow, did roosters really make calls that precisely?
@@Linfamy We may never know, since there's a big possibility, that all this system was metaphorical and the hours were not the same, since there was supposed to be a precise timing between the third rooster and the morning star
Ah gotcha :)
@@Linfamy Again, a lot of it has to do with rooster being seen as creatures capable of dispelling evil spirits and night being seen as the wicked hour.
@@СофіяФедюк-ш3т that reminds me of the passage in the Bible, when in the night before his death, Jesus tells his disciple Petrus that he would deny any connection to his master, before the rooster had cried three times. Petrus is adamant that he would not do that, yet when people recognize him, he replies with 'I am not one of these, I have no idea how you came to believe this' three times. Jesus comes back from the court, the rooster cries a third time, and the Master looks at his follower with a sad expression, because he had been right.
So the bird turns not only into a herald of the coming light, but also of the truth, and thus became the enemy of all thing that are wrong, especially in a spritiual way.
Not only did I learn about how the Japanese used to view time, I also learned about the little tab on the aluminum foil box. Thanks! 😊
You said European hours were different for night and day until the 1700's, then you said the European clocks in the 1500's they brought to Japan had 24 equal hours. I assume different parts of Europe had different systems?
Yeah it took time for mechanical clocks to become the norm in Europe. Most of western Europe adopted equal duration hours in the 1700s.
@@Linfamy Ah, I see. Thanks for the clarification!
In case you are wondering why unequal hours, think that before electric light there was little to do without sunlight. So your actual useful day would be shorter in winter than in summer.
Regular hours make a lot more sense when you start thinking about precise astronomical observations, like the ones that give you an estimate of the longitude of a ship in the middle of the ocean (European navies spent fortunes trying to improve their clocks/chronometers). So it is not strange that they were favored by the Europeans.
I didn't even know anything about Japanese history before I started watching, but since then this has been my absolute favorite channel. Really interesting obscure history and supur humor to boot, all tied together with a pleasing art style
There's a video somewhere here where they made a hand-crafted watch that shows both the current time and the traditional Japanese time, which also updates the Japanese hours automatically if you remember to keep the date set up correctly.
This dry commentary is on point. Instant-sub worthy. 🤝
Humans will literally learn astronomy and do head calculationa every time they need to check their clocks just for the opportunity to flex their wealth on cousin bobunaga
So a Japanese clock shows how much day time is left, but what if the day lasts a week 🤔 (Nordic problems.)
In Sundanese too. Well. I saw human centered to their body responses before the time zones being agreed. The circadian effect of the body by their environtment changes. It's just another logic. Like how you see geospatial before GPS. 😁
The variable system (I would say Japanese, but it is almost universal) makes more sense but the globalised world does need a common time system to function.
It makes more sense in an agrarian society where work is done outside in the sun. Once you need train/bus time tables and ppl travel for multiple appointments it becomes very unwieldy because the train schedule and travel times now vary on a daily basis and once ppl work in artificial light keeping a fixed time for dawn and dusk isn't helpful.
It's same reason why trains introduced a single time and time zones (which I guess is your point about globalization...though it applies even inside a country).
That's almost as crazy as shifting your new, shiny 24-hour system for one hour to "summer time" for half the year. 😝
“Let’s meet at horse-o-clock.”
“Naw, doesn’t work for me. What about mouse-o-clock?”
Gosh I laughed way to hard. Thanks for sharing this 😆
It would definitely be a feature to have dusk and dawn displayed on clocks and watches. Would be easy to implement on smart watches. Perhaps already exists.
Ooh that's a good idea :)
Certain things were known around the world but how they deal with those numbers makes total sense to them and the needs when the systems were established, then some dude shows up in a boat and starts drawing a different picture from all the same elements you were using. That has to be a wild experience.
Came to hear about traditional Japanese time measurement. Subscribed, when hearing "Oh, is it 8 o'clock already?" "No, Genji's just beating his kids again." *chef's kiss*
Ayy thank you for the follow-up video, as always very interesting; now to remind myself to not info dump this all on my fiancee who would politely listen while discreetly looking at her fancy Western style watch that shows NO regard for when sunrise is.
I bet she's late to everything
@@Linfamy if she is then it would have to be caused by some other guy xD
"They were used to unequal things."
Fuck, Linfamy managing to be both dire and hilarious at the same time without missing a beat.
Roman time was also variable with the hour and night divided into equal segments but the duration varied on the season. A daylight hour in summer was longer than one in winter.
This was mosh true in Europe as well until the invention of clocks. When you used sundials the hours varied
Nobody noticed... but your random @ 2:50 fresh prince of Bel-Air song text kicked me totally out of focus XD
They fixed day light savings without the time change hassle!
I don't know how, but I'm sure The Fujiwaras marrying their daughters into power caused this change too. I'm sure of it!
Jokes aside, great video as always.
Dear gods, I'm choking from those slavery jokes. Thank you.
After I saw the documentation of the 万年自鳴鐘 Mannen Jimeishou at NHK I remember that a independent Japanese watch maker build a wristwatch alone by hand with shifting time markers. Like the Mannen Jimeishou. People should watch the NHK documentation of the watch where also the position of the Sun and moon was replicated according to the day in the year. This is actually the thumbnail pictures of the video.
Well, modern Japanese time is also a bit different. I’m Japanese and am always confused 0:30pm doesn’t exist in other countries but they use 12:30pm instead.
Well yeah the 12h vs 24h devide is pretty weird. In Germany we also use 24 hours and not the am/pm time, although in casual conversation we do use 12hour format. I think even most countries do it that way.
If you measure time by the course of the sun, it makes sense to have hours with varying lengths, that will just follow the course of the seasons.
If you measure time with a mechanical device, it is a lot easier to have time flow consistently. When this change happened, people must have been very upset and confused, that suddenly the hour, on which the day starts (e.g. sun comes up) should be a little different every day. Our current system is a lot less intuitive, if you think about it.
We should really return to the old system. Nobody should work as hard in winter as they do in summer. Yeah, the pay is less, but it evens out year-round. Plus, it will make waking up and going to bed a lot more sensible.
The video is nice, if only it had more quips about asian heritages
I remember watching a chinese movie, don't remember which one, and during the start of the movie when had the peaceful part had a guy walking through the mansion/castle ringing a gong and say "Is the hour of X animal of the chinese zodiac" and seeing the japanese clock thing made me remember of that scenes.
Chinese also use the same 12 zodiac system, but the hours are fixed
Having to mentally convert two competing systems is a familiar skill you have to pick up if you live in the UK or Canada, where the imperial system is still pervasive in many things, but metric is the official standard.
Well, now noone in Japan use older time system, so...probably it was not as good as history says
1:17 ALL people in the world practiced slavery, not just Europeans, FYI. It was Europeans who ended the worldwide slave trade.