128 Book Reviews

continuum then was subject to periodization, or division into eras, such as ancient (∼645), middle
(chuko, 645–1185), Kamakura (1185–1336), Muromachi (1336–1604), and Edo (1604–1867),
which still hold today. Chronological time thus came to form the standard view of history. The
formation of this standard historiography, as well as the discourse of intellectuals such as Kato
Hiroyuki, Miyake Setsurei, and Okakura Kakuzo is examined in this process. Finally, Tanaka likens
the nation-state Japan to a museum, for it has obscured its historicity with various objects that
present the chronology of the national history as if it was natural.
Time is often discussed in relation to space, and Tanaka’s argument is no exception. Behind his illumi-
nation of the changing concept of the past lies his interest in ‘the space of experiences’. By ‘space’, Tanaka
does not necessarily mean a certain geographical stretch, or a social unit, like a family or community. In

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this sense, his analysis of Takayama Chogyu is of great interest. Takayama’s philosophy, according to
Tanaka, is the search for a balance between the autonomous individual and the nation-state; in other
words, he is seeking the reorganization of society, where individuals constitute the whole, rather than
being subject to the nation-state. He envisions the nation (kokumin) as distinguished from the nation-
state (kokka) that is, the nation is not a separate social unit but the accumulation of the activities of indi-
vidual people. Today, when Takayama’s vision has been virtually forgotten, Tanaka saves it from oblivion.
To challenge commonplace notions settled deeply in our minds, such as national history or the
nation-state, is no easy task. Tanaka, however, has successfully elaborated the course of Japan’s
remaking from the ingenious perspective of time, a familiar, yet under-analyzed, aspect of our lives.

References
Smith, Thomas C. 1986. ‘Peasant Time and Factory Time in Japan’. Past and Present 111: 165–197. Reprinted in Thomas
C. Smith, Native Sources of Japanese Industrialization, 1750-1920. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988: 199–235.
Mahathir, bin Mohamad. 1981 [1970]. The Malay Dilemma. Kuala Lumpur: Federal Publications.
Tanaka, Stefan. 1993. Japan’s Orient: Rendering Pasts into History. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Hashimoto Takehiko and Kuriyama Shigehisa, eds. 2001. Chikoku no Tanjo: Kindai Nihon ni okeru Jikan Ishiki no Keisei
(The Birth of Tardiness: the Formation of Time Consciousness in Modern Japan). Tokyo: Sangensha.

Steven J. ERICSON/Dartmouth College

The Birth of Tardiness: The Formation of Time Consciousness in Modern Japan, edited by Hashimoto
Takehiko and Kuriyama Shigehisa. Special issue of Japan Review: Journal of the International
Research Center for Japanese Studies, 14 (2002), 238 pp. (ISSN 0915-0986)

doi:10.1093/ssjj/jyi048 Published online January 24, 2006

This special journal issue includes translations of all but one of the essays appearing in Chikoku no
Tanjo: Kindai Nihon ni okeru Jikan Ishiki no Keisei (Tokyo: Sangensha, 2001).1 The essays

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1. For the English version, the editors left out one essay on Meiji calendrical reform and, from the ‘Suggested Readings’
guide, works on the general history and sociology of time.
 Book Reviews 129

resulted from a joint research project the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in
Kyoto sponsored in 1999–2000. The articles break new ground, for the broad question they
examine—how and why time discipline, ‘the very idea of “tardiness” [chikoku]’ (p. 6), emerged in
Japan—has heretofore received scant attention, especially in the English-language literature. We
have Thomas Smith’s pioneering article on ‘Peasant Time and Factory Time’ (1986), a brief anec-
dotal discussion of the effects of railroads on time consciousness in Ericson (1996), and a handful
of articles in the journal Time and Society (such as Nishimoto 1997), but little else.2 Even in Japa-
nese scholarship, this area of inquiry is relatively new; few of the works on the history of time in
modern Japan that co-editor Hashimoto lists in a concluding annotated bibliography predate the
mid-1990s.

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The essays in this volume cover most of the modern institutions that served as teachers of time
discipline in post-Restoration Japan: railroads, factories, government and private business offices,
schools, and media. About the only institution they omit is the military, another major promoter
of punctuality. In the first two essays, Nakamura Naofumi and Takemura Tamio deal with mana-
gerial and technological changes in the Meiji and Taisho periods that made possible on-schedule
operation of Japanese railroads. In their articles, Suzuki Jun and Hashimoto Takehiko examine
the enforcement of time discipline among factory and office workers from Meiji to early Showa.
Nishimoto Ikuko looks at regulations and textbooks in prewar primary schools to see how the
educational authorities tried to inculcate punctuality and the value of time in pupils and teachers
alike. Ito Midori follows with a study of Hani Motoko, who led the way in introducing time dis-
cipline into the household through the women’s magazines she and her husband founded in the
1900s.
The remaining essays offer a range of perspectives on time consciousness in Japan from early
modern to contemporary times. Morishita Toru, in a background article the editors somewhat
oddly place after the railroad pieces, investigates the fairly sophisticated methods that local
authorities developed during the Tokugawa period for measuring, announcing, and synchroniz-
ing time in and around the castle town of Hagi. Hasegawa Kai explores the confusion that the
shift to the solar calendar caused in the Japanese sense of seasonality by examining compilations of
‘season words’ for haiku. Uchida Hoshimi analyzes the importation and domestic production of
timepieces as the first Western consumer durable in Japan and estimates their rate of diffusion
during the Meiji period. Arai Yoshio turns to the contemporary scene and surveys daily activities
in a farming village from the standpoint of ‘time geography’, contrasting the time consciousness
of village and town inhabitants with that of big-city residents. Finally, co-editor Sugiyama discusses
the ways in which Western thinkers from the Greek philosophers to Benjamin Franklin linked the
abstract concepts of time and money; he concludes by drawing parallels between Japan and the West
in the 18th century, a time when both ‘witnessed the simultaneous formation of a money economy
and an ethic of industriousness’ (p. 228), and—like Morishita—suggests that the sources of modern
time consciousness in Japan may predate the railroads and factories of the Meiji era.
Although Hashimoto states in the ‘Introduction’ that the old ‘leisured sense of time underwent
radical change’ (p. 6) in the Meiji period, the contributors collectively seem to dispute that claim, for

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2. Related to the topic are translations of short monographs on the history of the Japanese clock and watch industry by one
of the contributors to the volume under review, Uchida Hoshimi (1986, 1987, 2000). An important recent addition to
the literature is Stefan Tanaka (2004).
130 Book Reviews

they make clear that modern time consciousness spread slowly and unevenly in prewar Japan, with
vestiges of the premodern sense of time persisting even to this day. Not surprisingly, Western observ-
ers around the time of the Restoration harped on ‘the frustrating slowness of the Japanese’ (p. 5); as
the British diplomat Ernest Satow recalled of those years: ‘neither clocks nor punctuality were com-
mon’ (p. 121). On 1 January 1873, the fledgling Meiji government replaced the traditional lunar–
solar calendar with the Western solar calendar; this move also entailed switching from the imprecise
variable-hour system, which had divided daytime and nighttime separately into equal units that var-
ied in length with sunrise and sunset, to the fixed-hour time system. Despite this change, however,
the Japanese by no means adopted a modern sense of time overnight. In fact, by the early 20th cen-
tury, Japanese commentators had long since joined Westerners in criticizing their compatriots’ ‘mad-

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dening indifference to the clock’ (p. 5).
The essays abound with examples illustrating the slow pace of change in this regard. Although the
railroads demanded a far more ‘minute’ sense of time than had prevailed prior to the 1870s, they
were notoriously unsuccessful in enforcing time discipline among their own employees. As late as the
1890s, train delays of half an hour still fell within the ‘permissible’ range for the largest railway com-
pany. By the turn of the century, railroad users had become increasingly critical of the laxness of rail-
way staff and the marked rise in accidents and errors accompanying the rapid expansion of the
industry. In fact, the railroads did not achieve on-schedule operation until the 1930s, long after the
nationalization of the major private lines. Suzuki shows that in workplaces the old variable-hour time
system survived well into the Meiji period; in 1900, for instance, the Tomioka Filature officially set
work hours according to the fixed-hour system but in practice adjusted them to the length of day.
Nishimoto suggests that primary schools had made little headway in instilling habits of punctuality
by the end of Meiji, citing the novelist Ishikawa Takuboku’s remarks on ‘lazy’ school clocks and
equally lazy teachers (p. 129). Furthermore, as Hasegawa points out, rural communities continued
to observe festivals according to the old lunar–solar calendar, forcing the Meiji government to print
the official calendar with old-style dates next to the new ones until 1909. Uchida, however, modifies
the general picture of the slowness of change by calculating that clock ownership grew from about
8% of all households in 1887 to 70% in 1907; with this diffusion, a new conception of time, one
‘based on hours of fixed length divided into minutes’ (p. 190), gradually permeated the consciousness
of ordinary Japanese.
Several of the essays point to the 1920s and early 1930s as the period when time discipline took hold
in a variety of fields in Japan and single out the contribution of Frederick W. Taylor’s ideas of scientific
management.3 The state railways, which led in the introduction of Taylorism among Japanese indus-
tries, had every one of their workshops conduct intensive time and motion studies in preparation for
the nation-wide mounting of automatic couplers on a single day in 1925. In Takemura’s view, this
unprecedented project caused the entire state railway system to recognize ‘the importance of tightening
up time’ (p. 59) and helped pave the way for the achievement of on-schedule operation in the 1930s.
Hashimoto highlights the activities of three Japanese apostles of scientific management, Ikeda Toshiro,
Godo Takuo, and Ueno Yoichi, who emphasized punctuality as a precondition for raising the efficiency
and productivity of employees in both private and state enterprises. Ito suggests that Taylorism may

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3. Ikeda Toshiro introduced Taylorism to Japan in a series of newspaper articles he wrote in 1911; two years later he col-
lected and published the articles in book form as Mueki no Tekazu wo Habuku Ho (Ways to Eliminate Useless Procedures)
(Tokyo: Jitsugyo no Sekai-sha, 1913), which became a best seller (pp. 103, en9).
 Book Reviews 131

have even shaped Hani Motoko’s highly influential approach to household management, as she began
in the Taisho period to break down domestic chores into subtasks and to set a standard length of time
for accomplishing each of them, all with the goal of creating a rational and efficient home life.
The essays sparkle in places with factual and anecdotal gems and feature some excellent candidates
for classroom use. Suzuki and Hashimoto, for example, note the summertime work schedule of pre-
war government offices whereby they opened for business only in the morning during mid-summer;
the authorities discontinued the practice in 1922, only to reinstate it in the 1930s. This summer half-
holiday system came under growing attack in the mid-1930s, with one critic sarcastically comparing
its practitioners to Western officials supervising their colonial subjects in the tropics. Both Hashimoto
and Nishimoto discuss the public campaign to promote punctuality centering on the designation of

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10 June as ‘Time Day’ (Toki no Kinenbi) in 1920. Leading the campaign was the non-governmental
League for the Improvement of Daily Life (Seikatsu Kaizen Domeikai), which on 10 June took chro-
nometers to busy street corners in Tokyo so passersby could synchronize their watches and spon-
sored lectures on time in schools and factories. To help mark the first Time Day, the Tokyo
Educational Museum organized an exhibition on time, with posters illustrating such topics as ‘total
time consumed for makeup [in] a woman’s life’ (p. 104). For the opening ceremony, the authorities
mobilized school children to release balloons with strips of paper bearing the characters for ‘punctu-
ality’ (jikan reiko ) (p. 130). Uchida states that by the turn of the century pocket watches had
become highly sought-after items, citing as an ‘odd’ illustration of this trend the offer by a newspaper
in 1898 of a gold pocket watch to the police officer who succeeded in catching a serial killer on the
loose ‘as a modest expression of encouragement’ (p. 191, en22). The particularly satisfying and
informative articles by Nishimoto on ‘teaching punctuality’ in the primary schools and by Uchida on
the spread of timepieces in the Meiji era stand out as possibilities for adoption in courses on modern
Japanese history.
Overall, the translation reads well, with only a few slips such as ‘Bruner’ for Tomioka’s French
engineer Paul Brunat and two different renderings of Seikatsu Kaizen Domeikai: ‘Living Conditions
Improvement League’ (p. 104) and ‘Association for the Improvement of Domestic Life’ (p. 130). In
largely uncharted territory, this work maps out a range of promising areas for classroom discussion
and future research.

References
Ericson, Steven J. 1996. The Sound of the Whistle: Railroads and the State in Meiji Japan. Cambridge, MA: Council on East
Asian Studies, Harvard University.
Nishimoto, Ikuko. 1997. ‘The “Civilization” of Time: Japan and the Adoption of the Western Time System’. Time and
Society 6(2/3): 237–259.
Smith, Thomas C. 1986. ‘Peasant Time and Factory Time in Japan’. Past and Present 111: 165–197. Reprinted in Thomas C.
Smith, Native Sources of Japanese Industrialization, 1750-1920. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988: 199–235.
Tanaka, Stefan. 2004. New Times in Modern Japan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Uchida, Hoshimi. 1986. ‘Osaka Watch Incorporated’. In History of the Japanese Clock and Watch Industry, vol. 1, eds. Japan
Business History Institute and Seiko Institute of Horology. Tokyo: Hattori Seiko Co.
———. 1987. Wall Clocks of Nagoya, 1885-1925, History of the Japanese Clock and Watch Industry, vol. 2, eds. Japan Business
History Institute and Seiko Institute of Horology. Tokyo: Hattori Seiko Co.
———. 2000. ‘Evolution of Seiko, 1892–1923’. In History of the Japanese Clock and Watch Industry, vol. 3, ed. Seiko
Institute of Horology. Tokyo: Seiko Corp.