Making Time: Astronomical Time Measurement in Tokugawa Japan by Yulia Frumer (review)

Scholars, including historians, are increasingly turning to time as an object of study. As in so much of the discipline of history, the focus has generally been on modern and Western societies rather than on ancient, medieval, early modern, or non-Western ones. Yet I am beginning to realize the potential of the moments prior to the modern for reconceiving historical times in our digital age. In this respect Yulia Frumer's fine study of astronomical time measurement in early modern Japan makes a welcome and needed addition. I wish the book had existed twenty years ago; it would have been very helpful as I sought to understand the antecedents to the transformation of time during the Meiji period.

Time is a difficult topic for historians. History operates on the assumption that time is regular, linear, external, and natural. Our current practice of history is based on the idea of the past as prior and distant, and chronology orders our discipline onto a linear matrix. A case in point is my invocation immediately above of periodization—modern, early modern, medieval, ancient. In this sense time both structures history and now is a topic of history. Work on the history of time takes great care to avoid what some might call the trap of history's teleological structure. In the case of Japan, the existence of this trap is demonstrated when scholars criticize and try to move beyond this teleology (various flavors of becoming modern), but this disavowal without tackling the very structure and basis of history—chronological time—allows that specter to continue haunting the discipline.¹

Frumer is intent on bringing early modern Japan out of the shadow of the modern period, a task that remains warranted and needed. She seeks a "fresh interpretation of the ways societies evaluate and attach meanings to technologies" (p. 3). She argues against the technological determinism of industrialization and the clock (citing E. P. Thompson's classic essay);² she shows that early modern Japanese intellectuals were increasingly sophisticated in their observational techniques and search for solutions to measurement discrepancies and that they sought out and used European astronomical studies not because they were Western, but because they helped solve complex problems of measurement. She is moreover quick to point out where concepts and conditions attributed to modern Japan existed or emerged in the early modern period.

Although the work has a generally linear structure—and Frumer comes remarkably close in her conclusion to describing Japan's experience as one of Westernization—its story is about the increasing abstraction of time measurement. The perspective, interestingly, is reversed: Tokugawa astronomers initially saw European conventions and knowledge as "nonsensical," then "comprehensible," and finally "desirable" (p. 200). Importantly, Frumer's analysis is associational, not linear or causal. She employs the notion of a web of associations to bring out the factors that existed as individuals tackled discrepancies; these associations range from complex astronomical observations and measurement to suitability to needs, social norms, and judgments. Here, Frumer argues that research into learning and adaptation must consider the broad societal conditions into which ideas and technologies entered. For Tokugawa astronomers the process of understanding and learning involved observation of the nonsynchronous as well as efforts to resolve different modes and metrics for calculation and, when appropriate, to study and adapt astronomical knowledge from Europe. Frumer's approach to studying this process is commonsensical, and yet it also conflicts with her structure of history, which retains a linear unfolding and a replacement of the old by the new.

The book can be seen as roughly divided into three parts. The first two chapters focus on the social and place-based notion of time in Tokugawa Japan. The next three chapters—the heart of the monograph—discuss how Tokugawa astronomers developed a mathematical and astronomically based understanding of time that was increasingly independent of human activity. The last three chapters return somewhat to the theme of how communities used and understood...