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...

You do not currently have access to this content.