Excerpts from The Bells of Old Tokyo: Meditations on Time and a City by Anna Sherman:

The world was like a leather bag filled with water, he once wrote, and at the bottom of the world was a puncture: time seeped out of it, drop by drop.

Time was like a whirlpool.

Time could be stopped if you stood between the sun and a sundial.

The present moment could be sometimes like the Mekong or Bangkok’s Chao Phraya: a vast river. The past and future were tributaries that sometimes overflowed their own banks, and spilled into each other.

Time was like a palace’s great hall, with partitions that could be taken away. Every instant that would ever be, or had ever been, might be seen all at once.

Sand pouring from a woman’s shoe: the most enchanting hourglass in the world.

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According to the anthropologist Carmen Blacker, the word for divination in Japanese is ‘ura or uranai, a term which appears to indicate primarily “that which is behind, and hence invisible” (nayra)

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But some imported ideas were rejected outright. In 1948, the Japanese, still recovering from the war and the lingering exhaustion that followed years of starvation and despair, held noisy protests against American-style Daylight Savings Time. The Occupation authorities were surprised: bringing the clocks forward an hour had seemed a minor innovation, when more drastic ones – granting suffrage to women, abolishing the hereditary rights of the nobility – drew fewer and less vehement complaints.

Daylight Savings Time became sanmah ta-imu (‘summer time’) in what the historian John Dower has termed ‘the marvelous new pidgin terminology of the moment. The Japanese felt summer time drew out the difficulty of their daily lives, and when the Occupation ended, it was one of the first things to be scrapped.

People wanted darkness to come earlier.

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Since the late nineteenth century, Japan has used the Western calendar, but never the Christian system of counting years from the birth of Christ…The end of the Cold War gave its name to the reign of Emperor Hirohito’s successor, Emperor Akihito: Heisei (‘Peace Everywhere’), because he ascended the Chrysanthemum Throne just as the Soviet Union was collapsing. The 9/11 attacks happened in Heisei 13. Under the old system, the emperor’s astronomers might perhaps have restarted time by calling a new nengo after the so-called Bubble Economy collapsed in 1991, or after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. But Heisei – Peace Everywhere has continued on, while North Korea launched missiles into the Sea of Japan and the United States fought al-Qaeda.

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In 1921, a “Correct Time” propaganda was carried out in Japan under the sponsorship of the Education Department, and some eighty bell-ringers were rewarded for their long and faithful service. The recipients…included two women, one of whom was named Matsu Obata, aged 82. For fifty years she had struck the bell twenty- four times a day, and she had been admired for her accuracy in the execution of her duty, one requiring a great deal of watchfulness…

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The monks wore enormous, tight-woven wicker barrels over their heads, hats that symbolize the death of the ego. When the Tokugawa fell, the emperor’s new government outlawed komusō, because they had often acted as spies for the Tokugawa. After 1868, komusō temples were burned, and much of the sect’s musical repertoire lost: notes that imitated the crying of cranes, or the beating of their wings; wind; petals falling; a bell. The Meiji authorities appropriated the beehive-shaped hat for convicts, who wore them into court. What had symbolized the ascetic’s ascension toward the sublime became stigmatized, an object of shame.

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Kobayashi moved toward the eighteenth-century tomb of Tsunayoshi, the ‘Dog Shogun. Tsunayoshi became infamous for his edicts that penalized anyone who mistreated animals, especially dogs. ‘For the sake of a single bird or beast, the death penalty was inflicted. Even relatives were given capital punishment or deported and exiled…one contemporary account complained, after Tsunayoshi’s death, and his so- called ‘Laws of Compassion’ were rescinded.

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Reducing a land to atoms,/ These atoms are measureless, untold./ Boundless lands, as many as these atoms/ are gathered on a single hair.

‘For Buddhists, the past, the future, and this moment: everything flows at the same pace, Takahashi said. ‘Every second is equal. The past and the future and what’s happening now, aren’t separate.

You can say a lot about time: but time is also things that don’t happen. I grew up in Hokkaido. On my route to school there was a crossroads and at the crossroads was a stop light. It was such a quiet place that my younger brother and I used to blast right through on our bikes without stopping. But one day, for some reason, I did stop. And a car whipped around the bend and zoomed through the crossing. If I hadn’t held back a few moments before, I would have died. Right in front of my younger brother.

Afterward I thought everything had happened in slow motion. For my brother, the moment went by like a flash. But time has the same flow: everywhere and always. How we think of it must just be a function of our brains. That sense is just the way we process our fear of death.

Because no one comes back to tell us what happens after we stop breathing, we’re scared of death. Time is the frame- work, the scaffolding, for how we experience that terror. Time lets us look away from fear. You might think of time as the life we have left.’

‘And the dead?’ I asked. ‘What about the dead?’

Takahashi shrugged. ‘The dead have slipped out of the framework.’