BLOG 2.  “The Western mechanical clock was useless in Samurai age.”

The photo here is the statue of Jesuit Priest Francisco Xavier (1506-52) standing beside a well to preach. (St. Francis Xavier Memorial Church in Yamaguchi city, Yamaguchi prefecture, Japan).

The survived oldest record that Japanese people had to know the Western mechanical time piece is in the biography of a feudal lord Ouchi Yoshitaka (1507-51) written by one of his vassals. The record reported that Xavier presented a clock to Ouchi to get the permission for missionary work in his territory in 1551 (ref: JAK p.13).

When Xavier showed the clock to him and his vassals, it made them amaze at the machine that automatically told time with the sound of a bell, but they also learned that it was useless for daily life, because Japan at that time had adopted the “irregular time system” divided the daytime into six equal parts and nighttime into six equal parts.