The Country That Had Clocks and Refused to Be On Time
The Country That Had Clocks and Refused to Be On Time Here’s the thing that broke my assumptions: Japan didn’t resist the mechanical clock. Japan got the mechanical clock from Jesuit missionaries in the 1500s, reverse-engineered it, and then — for 270 years — deliberately rewired it to tell a completely different kind of time. I went into this research question expecting a clean binary. Societies that adopted clocks early (Western Europe) versus societies that resisted them (everyone else), with measurable differences in how they structured labor, debt, and planning....