In Making Time, a meaningful addition to our understanding of early modern Japan, Yulia Frumer tells the story of how Japan went from dismissing Western methods of timekeeping as useless in the sixteenth century to eventually embracing them as preferable at the end of the nineteenth. Frumer argues that the Meiji reforms of 1873, which put Japan on a Western calendar and encouraged the use of Western time with its equal units of measure, was not the result of some realization of its superiority or as a practical matter for industrialization. Japan's timekeeping methods had worked fine for decades. Rather, the road to the West's temporal system becoming desirable was a long, voluntary process of incorporating Western timekeeping into astronomical, calendrical, cartological, and navigation studies and the result of changing “associations.” Frumer regards this last point as her most important. Acceptance of outside technology, she writes, is not just about practical needs, economic motivations, or social conditions, but also the values, habits, ideals, images, and materials associated with that technology. She asserts that for Western time to be adopted, “Japanese users first needed to integrate it into their web of associations related to practices of time measurement…” (p. 3).

The first European clock that came to Japan—on a Portuguese ship in 1551—was greeted with fascination but dismissed as “useless.” Japan, where variable time suited the needs of the general population until the nineteenth century, regarded the West's equally measured time units as inconvenient. Western timepieces were initially only useful to the extent that they could be adapted by craftsmen to Japanese systems and cultural associations. However, following the modification of Western technology in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a handful of astronomers, including shogunate astronomer Takahashi Yoshitoki, began employing Western measurements of time in calendrical computations and planetary diagrams in the eighteenth century. By the end of the century, influenced by the work of astronomers, cartographers, notably Inō Tadataka, incorporated the new concepts of time measurement into land survey. Following this development, individuals who were becoming interested in the potential of international trade at the turn of the century came to see the benefits of using Western timekeeping in their studies of navigation.

Frumer shows that the continued evolution of employing Western time conceptions involved both the expansion of work by astronomers, surveyors, and mathematicians, who came to find Western timekeeping useful and associated it with a growing admiration for Western science, and machine-makers, who created timepieces with shape, appearance, and movement that fit within existing cultural associations. The result was an increasingly positive attitude toward Western methods of keeping time, and an acceptance of mechanical devices with foreign origins by the general population. Finally, during the Meiji period, Western time was further linked to the driving Meiji rhetoric of bunmei kaika, or civilization and enlightenment, and “Western clocks came to be seen as the material embodiment of these new ideals” (p. 9).

Frumer is deft in relating this tale. Using a wide array of sources, she uniquely ties together well-known figures of Japanese intellectual history. Along the way, she provides the reader with many compelling vignettes. Her description of the intricate methods of synchronizing time within cities and across the country is fascinating (p. 33). Similarly fascinating is her case study of Endō Takanori, an official of the Kaga domain, who attempted to establish a “true local time” in the castle town of Kanazawa with an amazing variety of timekeeping devices (pp. 138–39). Her account of inventor Tanaka Hisashige's quest to create the ultimate timepiece, which could have become tediously technical, is a good read as well. Frumer also makes good use of numerous illustrations included throughout the text.

As she acknowledges, Frumer's analysis of the importation of Western concepts into early modern Japan adds to other recent work by Maki Fukuoka and Federico Marcon, who have revised our understanding of the timing and extent of the influence of Western conceptions of nature. Frumer challenges the notion that the abandonment of Japan's variable measure of time and the adoption of Western timekeeping should be understood solely as the result of industrialization or modernization. Furthermore, her research on the interactions among scholars makes a modest but notable addition to the recent historiography on the importance of Tokugawa intellectual networks by Eiko Ikegami, Ellen Nakamura, and Ann Jannetta. However, Frumer should have addressed the work of Stefan Tanaka, who until now has published the most ambitious history of time in Japan in English.Footnote ¹ Although he focuses on a subsequent period of history, his book's relationship to Frumer's final chapter on the Meiji period is too significant to completely ignore.

In addition, one area that deserves more attention is the process of how new conceptions of time entered the general population. Frumer does discuss the role played by clockmakers in introducing and spreading positive associations with Western time but could go further. A deeper investigation of popular cultural responses to Western time would aid Frumer's thesis about the importance of associations in the adoption of foreign technology. Similarly, I was left wanting more discussion about political motivations. Frumer believes in the primacy of “associations” in the adoption of Western technology, but politics and economic sensibilities certainly played a significant role as well.

Nevertheless, these suggestions do not undermine Frumer's achievement. Making Time is an enjoyable read with strong insights and a compelling argument. The book should be of interest to specialists of early modern and modern Japan, but also more broadly to historians who are concerned with science and technology, material culture, industrialization, and even globalized trade and nationalism. Although many of the chapters are too advanced for undergraduates, those sections that deal with timepieces could add a great deal to courses that cover early modern Japan. It is about time we had such a well-researched and astute study of this topic.