How the Japanese Kept Time Using Water, Fire, then Metal 

Time for another clock video. Related: Christians introduced mechanical clocks to Japan for GOD: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-qQVNxAVlR44.html What time is it? Time to sign up: www.patreon.com/Linfamy

"The road to family success is paved with the dead dreams of your children" Omgg 💯 somebody give this guy's scriptwriter a trophy and gold medal

My first thought of the incense burning clock was "That sounds like a fire hazard" Then I remembered "Dude, everybody was living in wood and thatch houses and the only source of heat, light and food was open flame. EVERYTHING WAS A FIRE HAZARD"

I imagine the incenses changed smells over their lenght and you'd know what time it is by fragrance....

"The road to family success is paved with the dead dreams of your children." That's my father's motto. Luckily, it dawned on him that if he's not paying for my education, he gets no say on what I would study.

This video has some big clock energy

Love your videos especially these clock ones!

I have been to Daimyo-clock museum in Yanaka. This video let me learn more about the old clocks.Thank you.

“They could have used thier most abundant form of energy at that time, but slaves were too big to fit in clocks” did not escape me

All those clocks are so beautiful that I'm kind of sad they went away.

The mechanical clocks had to be adjusted for time with differing lengths for day/night and season …but the same was true of water/incense/candle/sand/sun clocks, as well. Both in Japan, and in "the West". In texts from ancient Babylon, on water clocks, they talk about how much water to use for day vs night, and how to change the amounts, every half month.

Now I'm just thinking of how unique an Edo period time system in a Japanese themed game would be

The rotating dial one looks awesome.

Water. Fire. Metal. Clocks. Long ago, the four nations lived together in harmony. Then everything changed when the Clocks Nation attacked. Only the Avatar, master of all four elements, could stop them. But when the world needed him most, he vanished. Edit: this joke doesn't hold up anymore because Linfamy changed the title of the video. Shame on you!

I've been waiting for a video like this for a long time. Thank you. Consider a video on old japanese furniture? I'm curious about storage and living in a palace vs commoner home

The amount of effort that went into trying to make Japanese clocks work rather than just adopting the western time keeping method is insane. They went with several designs in decades when western ones remained relatively the same .You know why ? Because THEY WORKED !!!

This is very interesting. Can I ask how you go about finding your references for these videos? I have a hard time finding information on more obscure or very niche Japanese culture topics. Like I really want to look into Inoue Enryo's (Professor Obake) Mystery Studies, or to understand the particulars of the Zorigami; a tsukumogami clock.

You better have that list of reputable incensed houses, my man, or I'll send you to my Patreon. 🤝 Fun video.

Amazing

I was thinking that when the time changed they would have had little fireworks go off for the incense clocks. 1 firecracker for sunrise then 1 more for each hour so 2 for the second hour and so on.

5:34 I've seen grandfather clocks big enough that you could stand in one. I've always wondered why they don't work anymore.

Wow what a big clock you've got sunny

Is a clock maker keeping you hostage in his basement? Blink twice if you need help! In all seriousness really cool video! It must have been a nightmare deciding what clock to but back then lol

Having had to disassemble grandfather clocks by hand a few times, I have to say that the more compact versions of clocks devised by the Japanese sound a lot better. Brass weights suck to remove from a clock.

Toph would be happy about the metal clocks.

I love your content a lot!

Bruh these designs are sick af

There are so many scents incense comes in. It would be easy to make each hour a different scent.

If there’s any job I’m gonna be forced to do instead of my desire to be a biologist, a Japanese royal clockmaker is cool as heck

You could say Ancient Japanese time was a WILD TIME back then, eyyy! *Yeets herself out of the Japanese Castle*

The art is... EXPLOSION!!!

This was great. Thanks 😊

my guess about the incense clocks' way of alerting you about the amount of time that has passed is through smell. maybe they added something to the incense to make it have a different smell? edit: wow, I got it right

I guess different types of incense? Like an "hour" of lavender, another "hour" or cotton etc?

Just think, it went from water going from container to container or lighting incense to Seiko being a high end watch brand. That being said, I would really like a fire based clock.

"The road to family success is paved with the dead dreams of your children sounds like a like Freddy from the Nightmare on Elm Street Series would say

Now, I can understand on why Japanese has strong culture with the dealing on the times.

Hey! Linfamy thanks for the video! Quick question: at the start of the video when you talk about Japan and Korea potentially being on good terms, what is that hand symbol you have with the heart?- With the crossed index finger and thumb (I think). Thank you very much!!

Very interesting! I love old clocks!

My guess about incense clocks is that their scents would change scents every so often to indicate the passage of time

thanks to you, I managed to wash the dishes not felling homicidal 😊

this is very intersting video, thanks

This was fascinating! Now I want to look into how ancient Chinese people told the time, pretty sure they didn't change it up as often as the Japanese did 🤔

6:43 HEY IT’S US!!!

guess about telling time with incense clocks: different kinds of incense for each hour, so that you could tell the hour by the smell of the incense

what about household clocks for peasants and merchants? did they have wadokei or mechanical clocks or water, incense. Or did they have a town bell? Specifically would like to know about the sengoku period

watching tudor monastary farm show, and saw that europeans used to track dawn and dusk with foliets too. had the same variable hours as well

Those Japanese clocks are cool

My guess is by connecting to a fuse that would burning down a peasant village.

My guess for the incense clocks was little bits of gunpowder or fireworks embedded in the stream?

Maybe different insense smells to tell the time apart? Lavender til noon then sandalwood or something?

I thought they would hang metal balls on strings over the incens, so that when a certain point was reached the string would be burnt, the balls would drop and make a sound announcing the time.

Wow 😳

It would make sense, day hours and night hours, in a country whose east and west horizons were the distinct lines between water and sky.

[With restraint] Don't stop me now Because I'm having a good time Having a good time I figured it would be the smells, but imagine a grain of gunpowder for some hourly percussion

I though the incense would no longer produce smell, so they just use it as stopwatch, but wow i don't think they would make diffrent smell for different time !

Western brothels had small candles instead of incense sticks but similar idea.

Interesting

My first thought for introducing western objects like this,even when it had existed for a long time: inspiration unlocks the future - caproni

in households before the edo period how did commoners tell the time? was it a town bell or did households have incense clocks for themselves

ok not gonna lie legend of zelda majora's mask makes so much sense now lmao

It just came to my mind that I should have known about the Japanese old time counting before I read various books from the 11. Century like sei shonagons pillow book and especially murasaki shikibus prince genji. I always wondered about their time descriptions of night and morning for example when the gentleman visited lady's 😏 or when They wrote about the beauty of the night. I always wondered "when do they sleep?!" but now that I know the night was shorter I can imagine that intimicacy and staring at the moon was a short affair and especially the ladies are described falling asleep before the night arrived what means before Europeans really consider it night. I need to look further into this and learn about the seasonal time changes and maybe it will only rise my understanding of the Japanese old literature. Thank you so much, I knew they used zodiac animals for the time but not that the hours were irregularly long.

If memory serves correctly, incense clocks used gunpowder to announce the time.

Linfamy should make a video about sengoku jidai

Silly idea:maybe the incense lighted a fuse, which started a mechanism.

I thought the incense clocks would announce the end by making the house catch fire

Please do evolution of a Japanese courtroom.

Fire crackers. That's my guess for how incencts clocks could alert you to hour changes

im guessing how the incence clocks tell you, is the cracle of the fire, im at 2:30 EDIT: i was wrong, yeah idk waht i was thinking about lol

You could say this is a real tiktoc video!

"Perfect for houses . . ."

Could we possibly go into the introduction of wrist watches in Japan?

"and call it a day" 🤣

Did it change scent?

If my water clock is rockin don't come a knockin 😉

The answer could be fireworks? They would explode when the fire arrived to them.

My guess for how incense clocks could tell time is that different hours have a different type of incense, so it smells different.

another funny good vid and for me in a quarter incense stick guy lol.

Why do the traditional hours start at 4?

Did the incense clocks tell you the time by igniting a tiny amount of gunpowder at their end?

Water, fire, metal… that's three of the five elements. What about the other two? Where are the wood clocks, and earth clocks? ;)

2:23 The same way the Welsh did their fireworks.

I'm guessing the smell changed?

Did they put tiny fireworks in the powder so it would sparkle and crackle At each new hour

03:07 bragging about being a 4 stick man! ahahahahaha

I'm guessing little bits of slightly explosive powder at certain parts of the incense line- it would make a little banging noise, and you'd hear it. Edit: Nvm. Turns out I'm an idiot.

I thought it was Jeremy Clockson.

Well that's disappointing. Smells? I thought the way incense clocks announced the time was with little patches of gunpowder along the way. How exciting would that have been? BOOM! Suppertime!

Okay I promise I didn't cheat. The only thing that I can imagine is the change of the scent of the incense.

Europrian farmer too woked from dawn till duksk an i think most peopl dis farm. s. that ws common.

if a fly didn’t have wings will it be called a wake or a fly still

So many complicated clocks before huh...

*How it started* Europe: Why do you guys made smelly maze or fountain timer? Japan: Why do you guys made sketchy sparkle sparkle metal? *How it went* Europe: I don't know how long you gonna keep those clocks but we just gonna keep throwing ours anyway lol. Japan: Nah, no thanks. We're just gonna start our own business. Europe: Fuck. *How it still going* Europe: Hey, why you keep buying these clocks? Japan: Hush, great artists steal. Europe: What? O nevermind. *How it ended* Japan: Guess from now own we're just gonna be west. Europe: Pppppffffftttt. *How it may get revive* Japan: Oh, nevermind, let's just go back being our own east again. Europe: We'll see about that. Japan: Okay, boomer.

0:14 _"After all, I forsee korea and Japan being on good terms for a long while..."_ I mean he wasn't wrong. For hundreds of years korea and Japan was on good terms until the Meiji era

Different smells for different times?

different scent for different hours?

Finally, some clouds orientalism slowly drifting away.

30 minutes? Damn you guys count in minutes?

I really thought that they would put explosives in the incense

He said clock so much that the L disapeared ._.