This episode we talk a lot about geomancy, yin-yang theory, wuxing, etc. Here are some articles on the site that may be helpful. In particular the second link gives a much more in depth look at all of this than we got into this episode.

Mizuochi Ruins site

You can see how it was on a raised bed, with many pillars holding up a building of some kind

Mizuochi basin

The stone basin here, and the covered area leading to it, likely had some water-based function. This may be where the water clock sat so that it could fill up and drain out.

Mizuochi site placard

This shows how some think the site may have looked with the water clock installed.

Water clock example

Placard from the Asuka Historical Museum. It includes an image of a Tang style water clock. The 4 reservoir clock was designed in the early 7th century, and is probably what was brought to Yamato.

Water clock model

A model of what the water clock may have looked like at the time, including the “official” who indicates the time as the water pushes the measuring stick through his hands.

Welcome to Sengoku Daimyo’s Chronicles of Japan. My name is Joshua, and this is episode 127: Time and Direction in Ancient Yamato

Officers of the court stood in the pavilion. The soft trill of water could be heard trickling from one reservoir to the next. They watched closely, as the figure of a court official, one hand out, pointing at a measuring stick, slowly rose along with the water. Eventually, the figure’s outstretched arm indicated a line with a single character next to it.
On cue, one of the officials began to beat the large drum that was nearby. The rhythm was slow, but deliberate, and the sound was loud, echoing out to the mountains and back, showering the nearby palaces in a layer of sound. Across the palace, people briefly paused, took note of the number of strokes, and by that they knew the time of day. Without giving it much more thought, they then went about their business.

This episode we find ourselves partway through the reign of Naka no Oe, aka Tenji Tennou—his formal reign started in 668, but he had been pretty much running things since the death of Takara Hime in 661 and, arguably, for much longer than that. 668, however, saw Naka no Oe ascend the throne in his new palace of Otsu no Miya, officially making him the sovereign. And although 645 is the year Naka no Oe and others had started the Taika Reforms, it’s not wrong to say that that 668 and the start of Naka no Oe’s official reign, brief as it would be, that he finally had the ability to bring it all together and set it into stone.
We’ve talked about many of these reforms before on the podcast, but a lot of them were associated with the continued push to incorporate continental concepts into Yamato society, covering everything from court ranks to how to organize agricultural production. Of course, there was also Buddhism, which we’ve covered numerous times, but there were other concepts coming across as well, including ideas about history and writing, as well as ancient STEM—Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. This included architects, and new ways of constructing buildings. And it also meant ways of seeing the world, including things like directions and time.
And this is what I want to focus on this episode, taking a break from the primary narrative to spend some time on what we might call Yamato concepts of science, especially how they thought about the structure of reality organization of time and the universe – their cosmology, as it were. After all, to better understand the reasoning and motives of people, it is helpful to try and understand how they saw the world, not just for translation—understanding what it means when an entry says something like the “Hour of the Horse” on an “Elder Wood” day—but also for understanding how things actually worked in their eyes. For instance, the idea of ”auspicious” and “inauspicious” times and directions is something that most listeners probably don’t incorporate much into their daily lives, but the Chroniclers and the people of Yamato absolutely did, so understanding concepts like this can sometimes be the key to unlocking why historical people may have taken the actions that they did. In particular, we’ll talk about things like yin and yang, five elements, ten stems and twelve earthly branches, and what all this meant for the Yamato ideas of organizing time and space.
A large part of Yamato cosmology is tied to something called Onmyoudou, literally the Way of Yin and Yang, which in the organization of the Ritsuryo state fell under a particular ministry, known as the Onmyo-ryo.
If you’ve heard of Onmyoudou before, you likely have heard about the “Onmyouji”, practitioners who studied the flow of yin and yang—and who could reportedly do miraculous things with that. A 10th century Onmyoji, the famous Abe no Seimei, is perhaps the most well-known, with numerous stories about his exploits, which were then turned into a fantastical series of stories by the award-winning author, Baku Yumemakura. Those were then turned into Manga, movies, and more. Abe no Seimei is like Japan’s Merlin, or Gandalf, at least in the stories.
Back to the organization we mentioned, the Onmyou-ryou was responsible for Yin-Yang theory, or Onmyou-dou, which included divination, as well as astronomy, or Tenmon-dou, and calendar making, or reki-dou. While some of this was based on straight up natural observances, a lot of it was explained through older concepts of Yin and Yang theory. Today, you might encounter a lot of this in the theories around Feng Shui, and this can also be referred to as “geomancy”, or earth divination.

To give a broad overview of Onbmyoudou and its origins, it is part of a large corpus of concepts focused around a concept of energy known as qi or ki—which forms the basis for a lot of Chinese and Japanese cosmology, or their concept of how the world worked. Much of this is tied up in concepts that are modernly broadly called “Daoist” or associated with so-called Daoist practices. That term can be a bit misleading, as strictly speaking, Daoism refers to the teachings of the legendary philosopher Laozi, in his book, the Dao De Jing, as well as works attributed to later authors, like the Zhuangzi. There is some controversy as to when and to what extent this strict Daoism came to Japan. However, in the broader sense, the category of “Daoist “ practices includes an entire panoply of various folk practices, including concepts of Yin and Yang – and in the archipelago, many of these concepts were imported with the various books that people had acquired on the mainland, even if they weren’t strictly tied to Daoist religious practice. For example, there were aspects that were borrowed by various Shinto shrines, and others formalized into ritual practices under the new government. And of course many of these became linked to various Buddhist teachings and practices, as well.

But what did this actually look like in concept and practice for practitioners of Onmyoudo in Japan? Let’s start with the idea of yin and yang. One of the earliest references comes from the Zhou Yi, the Zhou Book of Changes, the core of what we also know as the Yijing, the Book of Changes. Here we see the idea that the universe began with a single force that split into two, and those two forces make up all of creation in one way or another. Yin and Yang, or In and You—or even Onmyou—refer to these forces, which are characterized as shadow and light, moon and sun, female and male, cold and hot, etc. So these forces are opposites, but it should be noted that they are not necessarily good or evil. After all, too cold is just as bad as too hot. Likewise too much darkness is as blinding as too much light.
As most people have seen, yin and yang are often depicted as a circle divided into two comma shapes, with a smaller circle in each. One side is white with a black circle and the other is black with a white circle. This is the “Tai Chi” diagram, but the diagram itself doesn’t seem to have been depicted like this prior to the 11th century, at least that we are aware. But the concepts are much older.

Now if you’ve heard of the Yijing, where it came from is something of a mystery. One theory is that it started as a written account of folk wisdom, and may have even given instructions for things like when to plant and when to harvest, based on changes in various heavenly phenomena.   But overall it is organized into 64 chapters, each associated with a particular hexagram. Start with a line, that can either be a full line – representing yang – or a broken line representing yin. Stack three of these on top of one another and you get a trigram. If you chart out every single possible combination of yin and yang lines, you get 8 unique trigrams, sometimes referred to as the baqua. Stack two trigrams atop one another and you get a hexagram, a combination of 6 lines that can have 8 by 8 or 64 unique variants.
It’s theorized that the Yijing resulted from taking all of the collected sayings or aphorisms and bits of advice and cataloguing and dividing them into 64 chapters, each one associated with a given hexagram. Going further, each line of the hexagram is associated with particular line in Yijing, and various meanings are ascribed to it and its association. It’s a complex and fascinating system and I don’t have time to go into it fully, but I would note that this was used as a form of divination—yarrow stalks or other means of random lot drawing that gives you a binary outcome – zero or one, yin or yang – could be used to determine the six lines of any given hexagram. This, in turn, would reference a chapter in the Yijing which was then interpreted as a sign as to how to read a given situation that you might find yourself in.
What’s really important to understanding the worldview of the time is this idea, represented by the hexagrams in the Yijing, that you can encompass everything about the universe by making and cataloging different amounts and arrangements of yin and yang. It’s a science, as it were – a systematic approach to understanding the differences in the world by breaking it into component parts.    And if this seems preposterous, consider this: today we understand that all things are made up of tiny atoms. And these atoms are all made up of the same material—protons, neutrons, and electrons. And yet, how those atomic particles combine create atoms with wildly different qualities. And how those atoms then combine into molecules and so on and so forth describe how we explain everything around us. So is it really so far-fetched?
I’m not saying that we should suddenly start to figure out the measurements of yin and yang in everything, but if we want to understand how the people of the time saw their world, it may be helpful to hold an open mindand understand the assumptions that they were working from and where they came from. As human beings, we naturally look for connections in the world around us, and this was no exception. People would observe facts, know how that it worked, and often then would back into the reason for it. This is a tale told across cultures, and we still see it, today. At the same time, we’ve developed structured approaches to test out our theories, empirically.
So for the moment, let’s leave the trigrams and hexagrams, and talk about another idea that also gained traction as people were trying to figure out how the world worked. This was the five elements theory also known as Wuxing, or Gogyou, in Japanese. The five elements in this case are Fire, Water, Wood, Metal, and Earth. Some may notice that these, along with the sun and the moon, are used in Japanese for the days of the week: Nichi (sun), getsu (moon), ka (fire), sui (water), moku (wood), kin (metal), do (earth).
Buddhists, by the way, also had an elemental system with only four elements, Fire, Water, Air, and Earth, possibly connected with some Greek influence, and brought along with Buddhist practice. For now, however, let’s focus on the five elements.
The idea in wuxing is similar to that of yin and yang in that everything in creation is made up of these five elements in some degree and configuration. Furthermore, there are creation and destruction cycles. So fire creates ash, or earth. Earth gives birth to metal. Metal creates water—look at a cold piece of metal in a warm environment and see how the water droplets form on it, and imagine what that looks like without understanding humidity and how there could be water vapor in the air. And then water creates wood, or plants—any farmer could tell you that without water the plants die. And wood is where we get fire from.
Of course, the reverse cycle is the opposite. Fire eats the wood. Wood drinks up the water. Water rusts metal. Metal tools plough the earth. And Earth can be used to douse fire.
Finally, there is another cycle of weakening. ,. Because fire heats and weakens metal, metal chops down wood, the trees roots break up rocks, the earth soaks up water, and water likewise puts out or weakens fire.
So the theory went, if these elements make up all matter, these relationships continue on a more complex scale in everything. So if something was thought to contain a lot of “fire” element, then it would be potentially helpful if you needed “Earth” but destructive or at least weakening to metal and wood. Properly accounting for these elements was important to achieve the results you were looking for, whatever that may be.   These were the kinds of things that were incorporated into traditional medicine practices, but also applied to auguries or divination about things like where and how to build a building. Even today, Shrines will sell calendars that help people know the prominence of certain elements, and some folk remedies may look to balance elements, much as medieval European medicine was often designed to balance the four humors that ancient physicians believed were present in the human body.
The chart of these five elements and their relationships is something you may have seen. It is a five pointed star, often inside of a circle. Of course this is also similar to a western pentagram, though typically drawn with the point of the star up, but it has nothing to do with Christian values or Satan, or anything similar. Rather, it is just a way to represent these five elements, and you’ll see it frequently in reference to Onmyoudou.
The elements were used to categorize many different areas into groupings of five. This includes grouping the various directions into five directions. Of course, you may be wondering about that, since most societies usually mark four cardinal directions, and in this case, they did the same, but added the fifth as “center”.
And so you get things like the north is water. It is related to cool, or cold weather. It is represented with the color black.
To the south, opposite of the north, is fire. It is hot, and the color is red. Of course, this probably doesn’t take a huge leap to see the connections they drew: since these civilizations are in the northern hemisphere, the farther north you go, the colder it gets, and the farther south you travel, the warmer it gets, generally speaking, at least until you reach the equator.
Meanwhile, the west was related to metal, and the color white, while the east was related to woods and forests, and the color…. Blue. Alright, that last one, in particular, probably doesn’t make sense to a lot of us. After all, we likely associate blue with water, and wood, or trees, would be associated with brown or, possibly, green. Well, in this case, it goes beyond that. The north is water, but it is also associated with darkness—shorter days in the winter, and things like that Sothe association of north with black makes sense, but many also look at the ocean and don’t necessarily see it as “blue”, or dark or even black, like Homer’s famous “wine-dark sea”.
Furthermore, although they have a word for it (midori), “green” was not a primary color in Japan, instead considered more of a shade of “aoi”, or blue. Even today they refer to a “green” traffic light as an “aoi shingo, not “midori” shingo. So if you asked someone in the Asuka period to describe the wooded hills and fields, they would have likely used “aoi”.
And of course, we are missing the fifth element. In the center we have the element earth and the color yellow.
A lot of these different concepts were brought together during the Han period, when they were trying to syncretize all of the various philosophies and attempts to describe the world and bring them all together into a single system. This meant that the Yijing, the wuxing theory, and others were mixed together with various other philosophies and theories of how the world work. Things like the Shanhaijing, the Classic of Mountain and Seas, along with stories about immortals, the Queen Mother of the West, and more were all rolled together, and basically assumed to be true. This included various real-world observations. Therefore, there were many attempts to try and reconcile these various theories together.
One of the other concepts, which we’ve discussed before, was the system of ten heavenly stems and the twelve earthly branches. We’ve mentioned this before regarding the sexagenary style of counting the years, but we’ll recap here. The ten heavenly stems and the twelve earthly branches are concepts that go back to at least the legendary Shang period, and even show up in various bronzes Andit wasn’t until later that they would be associated with other ideas. The ten heavenly stems were each associated with one of the five elements, with each element being represented by a greater and lesser, or elder and younger, stem. And then each of the twelve earthly branches were associated with animals—what we often call the Chinese Zodiac.
We talked about how this applied to the calendar, in that it was used to track years in 60 year cycles, but also it was used to track days of the year.
The twelve earthly branches were also used for earthly directions. The first, the rat, was in the north, and the order continued clockwise to the east, the south, west and then back to the north. Now this means that the four cardinal directions—north, south, east, and west—all match up nicely with one of the twelve earthly branches, but as for northeast, southeast, southwest, and northwest? Those were all combinations of two branches. So, for instance, the northeast was a combination of the ox and the tiger, or ushi-tora.
Speaking of eight directions, where have we also heard the number eight come up recently? That's right: the eight trigrams, or bagua. So each one of those trigrams, each representing a different concept, got associated with a direction as well.
This makes it easier to see where practices of geomancy came from.   You had a system with complex, overlapping associations between concepts and the physical world, and in the Tang dynasty, they used all of this to understand not only how things had happened, but also how the world would be in the future—in other words, they tried to use it to make predictions. Hence the “mancy”.
In the Yamato state, all of this became an official part of the government under the Onmyoryou: a branch of the government whose job is to make observations and figure things out from there, for the good of the state and the people. They made observations of the heavens to figure out how the calendar should be aligned—which months should come at what time, and when there should be “leap months”, or intercalary months, to keep various astronomical phenomena in the correct seasons, which were also further divided up into 24 periods. They also kept track of the movement of bodies like the various planets, because those planets were also assigned values, and thought to affect the flow of energy within this framework. And so comets, storms, eclipses, and more were all important because of the theory that everything in the heavens impacted and were reflections of how things were happening on the earth. Similarly, these various discussions of white animals and other omens were likely captured and catalogued by these officials as well, attempting to figure out what they meant.
All of this also influenced things like how palaces, buildings, and even capitals, would be built and laid out. For the palace, it was important the the sovereign be in the north, looking south. In fact, many maps would have south at the top because that is how a sovereign would be viewing it, were it stretched out before them. And one would need to consider various features, including mountains and streams, as all of those things carried various meanings, but it wasn’t as simple as just finding the one thing that could affect a person. As they observed differences they would also have to catalogue what happened and try to determine what the cause could be, based on their understanding of the world. And in the archipelago this would also include an understanding of Buddhist and local kami-based wisdom and knowledge as well.
One of the things in the Chronicles that inspired this episode was something I actually mentioned last time, a record from 666 talking about Chiyu, a Buddhist priest of the Yamato no Aya family, who presented a south-pointing chariot to the sovereign, Naka no Oe. this appears to be the same Chiyu from a similar record in 658, which also refers to him building a south pointing chariot. So did it take him eight years, or is he just now presenting it to the sovereign? And what, exactly, is a south-pointing chariot?
Well, as the name implies, a south-pointing chariot is a two-wheeled chariot that always points south. More appropriately stated, it is a wheeled device with a figure on top, much like a weather vane, which always points south. This is usually described as the figure of a person or an official pointing in the appropriate direction. This was a mechanical, rather than a magnetic compass. As the chariot, or carriage, is wheeled around, the two wheels spin. The wheels themselves are independently connected to a series of gears. If the wheels spin at the same rate, then their movement cancels each other out. However, if one wheel turns more than the other, then it will cause the figure on the top to rotate. Of course, as the chariot turns to the right, the left wheel, traveling along the outer diameter, will travel farther than the right. This will cause the figure to turn counter-clockwise to the left, but from an outside observer’s perspective, it will continue to point in the same direction, even as the chariot itself turns. Turning to the left would cause the opposite effect.
Though it may have been used earlier, there appears to be reliable written evidence of a South Pointing chariot starting from the third century. The first one was based on much earlier stories of a similar device, but it is unclear if it was a chariot, some other device, or even just a legend that was told as historical fact. From the third century on the design appears to have been continuously improved upon.
I should point out that all we have is descriptions—we don’t have any actual south pointing chariots, let alone diagrams showing how the mechanisms worked. There is the possibility that it used a kind of differential gear to work automatically, but we don’t have any actual evidence. There are other theories that it may have required some kind of manual switch, so that it would attach to one wheel or the other as needed. That would require that the chariot be moving in either a straight direction or turning in one particular direction, which seems rather unwieldy.
I noted some of the problems with this, and even moreso in a place like Japan, where 70% of the terrain is mountains. Up and down hills, along paths that are likely anything but the smooth, paved surface we have for roads today—and even those have plenty of irregularities and potholes that could throw off any such device.
And if you want to use it for any real distance, then you have to factor in other things, including the curvature of the earth. After all, with the earth being a sphere, any chariot traveling due west to east or east to west, other than at the equator, would have one wheel traveling farther than the other one. Granted, at the scale we are talking about, it probably is all but negligible, and the rough terrain and simple slippage of what were most likely wooden gears probably entered a lot more variability than the earth’s curvature.
One of the other issues is that the chariot only points “south” if you set it up to do so.   And if you know that, well, why do you need a south-pointing chariot? Ultimately, it seems that this is more of a novelty item, good for impressing crowds and demonstrating some engineering principles, rather than an actual, useful invention. After all, it was forgotten about and recreated multiple times, often centuries apart. Had it been a truly useful invention, it probably would have been kept in constant use. Meanwhile, I suspect that there were a fair number of farmers and others who knew that you could more easily and reliably use the sun and stars, as long as the weather was clear.
There is also some evidence of an understanding of magnetic compasses since at least the 2nd Century BCE. Early Han sources suggest that a spoon made of naturally magnetized ore could be placed on top of a polished bronze surface, and it would align itself north to south. We don’t have any actual surviving examples, however—there are later versions that you can find, where the plate is divided up into various directions, and then a magnetized “spoon” is placed on top, but nothing has actually come from Han tombs. Furthermore, this seems to mostly be for geomantic purposes. A more practical compass, with a magnetized needle, seems to have been developed by the 11th century, which could then be used for actual navigation.
By the way, the “spoon” as a compass pointer may be in reference to the “Big Dipper” constellation, which was envisioned as a spoon, or ladle, in shape. The seven stars were often used in geomancy, likely because of their importance, at least in the northern hemisphere, of pointing to the north. So there’s some thought that the “needles” of these early compasses weren’t litterally spoon shaped, but symbolically representive of the Big Dipper or the Northern Ladle.
Quick astronomy lesson, here. If you are in the northern hemisphere, particularly from the 35th parallel to the north pole, you can see the seven stars that make up the constellation or asterism we know as the Big Dipper.   In English we sometimes also refer to this as Ursa Major, though technically the familiar seven stars are just a part of that larger constellation. In Japan, the same constellation is often referred to as Hokuto Shichisei, the Seven Stars of the Northern Ladle. It can be seen further south, but parts of it may dip below the horizon during the autumn season.
It is important for several reasons. One is that it is made up of particularly bright stars, which you can generally see even when other stars may not be visible. Second, its distinctive shape lends itself to being easy to find in the sky. And finally, if you draw a line between two of the stars at the end of the “cup” of the ladle, you can follow that line to find Polaris or hokkyokusei, the north star, which means you know which direction is north- and once you know that, you can use it to figure out any other direction. And Polaris is less than a degree off of true north, making it even more accurate than most magnets, as the magnetic pole can be quite different, depending on its current position, and magnetic north changes over time as the magnetic field around the earth fluctuates.
That said, this was not necessarily the case in ancient times. Four thousand years ago, the star closest to true north would have been the star Thuban, in the constellation Draco, a star that most of us probably haven’t heard of. Polaris, in the constellation Ursa Minor (the Little Bear, also known as the Little Dipper) apparently took over as the north star around 500 CE. However, even before then, the mouth of the dipper could still be used to indicate north. In fact, if you draw a line between two of the stars in the back of the constellation, then you also end up finding Thuban. So even if the north star itself wasn’t accurate, finding the dipper would still help you orient yourself, especially if you can find true north during the day and then compare that with the constellation at night.
Which helps to understand why astronomy, or Tenmondou, was so important in the Onmyouryou. Though it wasn’t just a study of stars, but of the way of the heavens in general. And the changes in the heavens, brings us to another important concept—the flow of energy across the seasons. From the bright days of summer, filled with sunshine and yang energy, to the dark yin energy of winter’s long, cold nights.
It wasn’t enough to just know what happened, and where, but when was also important. Obviously you need to know when to sow seeds, flood the fields, and harvest the rice. Beyond that, though, you have other concepts, such as how the the day and hour of an event could be symbolically important. And of course, all of these had their own associations with various concepts of the flow of yin and yang energy.
Now knowing the year, the month, and even the day is largely just a matter of counting. But let’s talk about something a little more tricky: How do you know the hour?
This brings us to the vignette at the top of the episode, about the clepsydra, or water clock, that Naka no Oe is said to have built.
Now we talked about some of the fountains and similar things that have been discovered in the Asuka region back in episode 118. One thing that they believe they also found evidence of is something called a water clock, which is, as its name suggests, a clock powered by water. It is typically depicted as a series of three or more boxes or reservoirs that each hold an amount of water. Water is placed in the top reservoir, and then a hole towards the bottom is unplugged and it is allowed to drain into the box beneath. The hole is of a particular size, and thus the water flows at a constant rate, filling up the container below, which has a similar hole, etc. all the way to a reservoir at the very bottom. The multiple boxes mean that the water level in the intermediate boxes stays relatively constant, resulting in relatively consistent pressure and flow rate. The last reservoir has a measuring stick on a float, so that as the last box is filled with water, the measuring stick raises up. Since it is rising at a constant rate, one can use that to tell how much time has passed, regardless of anything else. Thus you can keep time even at night.
There is a record of Naka no Oe making one in the fifth month of 660, and he would have another one built in 671, which we will discuss later. It is interesting that both of these inventions appear twice in the narrative—once during the reign of Naka no Oe, aka Tenchi Tenno, and once during the previous reign, that of Takara Hime, aka Saimei Tenno. In this case it is said that 671 is the first time that the water clock, or roukoku, was actually used.
From what I can tell, there is nothing that definitively indicates that the Mizuochi site in Asuka was definitely the site of Naka no Oe’s water clock. There isn’t much in the Chronicles telling us what it was like or where, exactly, it was built, and there wasn’t anything found at the site naming it as the location of the roukoku. However, the site is in a prominent enough place, with channels for water and a pavilion of some sort. They definitely found evidence of pipes, remnants of lacquered wood, and reservoirs for water, among other things, that suggest something to do with moving water happened in this area. So it seems a very strong choice, as it all fits with theoretical archeological reconstructions.
A water clock like this is excellent for keeping accurate time at all hours of the day. However, it does have a slight problem in that anyone without a clock is still going to have to use the sun and similar heavenly cues to know what time it is. So how do you let them know? Well, it turns out that the continent had an answer for that as well, and instituted various systems of drums and bells to let people know the hour. In fact, some of these practices continued, in one form or another, right up to the modern day—with or without a water clock. After all, the key was to give the community some sense of the passing of time, but I doubt anyone was using it to time things more precisely than a general idea of an hour—though they did have the concept of their own minutes and seconds. Which brings us to just how they saw time back then.
The system of time that the Chronicles seems to use also came over from the continent, where there appear to have been several different methods for telling time prior to accurate clocks. And while there was an idea of dividing the entire day into twelve segments, the time as it was announced was not always consistent with those twelve segments, or hours. Rather, time was based around the key parts of the day. So, for instance there was sunrise, noon, sunset, and midnight. And while noon and midnight remain exactly twelve hours apart, sunrise and sunset change with the seasons. So if you call out sunrise, and then divide the time between sunrise and noon into equal segments of time, the size of those time segments change with the seasons. On top of that, because of the tilt of the earth and our slightly irregular orbit around the sun, the sun appears to “move” across the sky faster or slower throughout the year, with a difference of about 30 minutes total between the extremes. This isn’t going to affect most people’s daily lives, but would have been noticeable to those taking accurate measurements.
In ancient Han, this appears to have been common in cities and towns, with a watch that would call out as they progressed on their rounds at set points in the day and night, relying largely on heavenly cues—which I suspect did not lead to the most accurate timekeeping, but it was sufficient for what most people needed. The telling of time in this manner was partly to help with keeping track of the time of day, but was just as much an announcement that the watch was on duty and a warning to would-be criminals.
Now a water clock was an excellent device for keeping track of a standard, absolute time, such as it were, but it required constant maintenance. If you already have a watch calling out the time, perhaps they can also keep the water clock properly set, but you did have to have someone constantly filling it up and draining it at known points of the day. Plus there was the problem that you only knew the time if you could check it, and this wasn’t like a clock tower or something similar.
And so in 671 it appears that Nak no Oe instituted the continental idea of drums and bells to announce the time to the people—or at least to those at the court. We don’t have a record of exactly how they were, used, but we can infer from other sources on the continent, and what we do know that some tradition of announcing the time with drums and bells continued to be employed in Japan until the Meiji era, though perhaps not without interruption: Temples and the like had bell or drum towers, and as the day progressed they would beat out the time. It was not, however, telling time as we might think of it, with one stroke at the first hour, two on the second, etc.. In fact, in many ways they counted backwards, and they only counted 12 hours, not our modern 24. By the Edo period it seems that it was common practice to toll the bells nine times at noon and at midnight. From there, they would count down, with 8 bells at roughly 2 o’clock, 7 bells at 4 o’clock, and 6 bells at 6 o’clock. That would be another issue. From 6 o’clock, the number of bells that would be tolled continued to decrease, so that at 8 o’clock it would be 5 bells, then 4 bells at 10 o’clock. It would then jump back up to 9 and start over again.
Why these numbers were used for the different hours we are not entirely sure, and I have no idea if these numbers were the same ones used back in the 7th century—though it does seem to match similar continental traditions. Even the hours themselves were known by the twelve signs that came to be associated with the zodiac: the hour of the rat, the hour of the ox, the hour of the tiger, etc. Midnight fell in the middle of the hour of the rat, and noon fell in the middle of the hour of the horse, with each hour being almost exactly 2 hours by modern reckoning.
There were other systems in use as well. One divided the entire day up by 100 and then each of those divisions by another 10. The key was whether or not it was an absolute or relative measurement.
Something like the roukoku would indicate an absolute measurement. After all, the fall of water from one reservoir to another was not affected by the change in seasons—at least as long as the water didn’t freeze. The flow was constant, as was the measurement of time.
For those using other forms of reckoning, such as celestial phenomena or even a sundial, things might be a bit less accurate. This was especially true when using concepts like “sunrise” and “sunset”. Still, through observing the changes over the year, people eventually figured out charts and rules to help reconcile absolute forms of measurement with solar time.
There were other methods for telling time, as well. Perhaps one of the more pleasant was the use of incense sticks. By the time of the Tang dynasty, incense in stick form was relatively common, and it had been noticed that sticks of incense could burn at a fixed rate. This meant that you could use incense sticks like candles were used in Europe, counting down how far they had burned to tell what time it was. If you were really fancy, you could make a single stick out of different types of incense, so that as it hit a new hour, the scent would change, alerting you to the time through your olfactory senses.
Speaking of time, we are coming to the end of ours for this episode. We do have some more information on this on our website, Sengokudaimyo.com, and we’ll have links to those sections of the website accompanying our blog.
Next episode we will focus more on the reign of Naka no Oe, aka Tenji Tennou, from his seat at Otsu no Miya.
Until then, thank you once again for listening and for all of your support.
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And that’s all for now. Thank you again, and I’ll see you next episode on Sengoku Daimyo’s Chronicles of Japan.

References

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Rough Transcript

References