New Times in Modern Japan.(Book review)

Historian, The, March, 2006 by Kinzley, W. Dean

New Times in Modern Japan. By Stefan Tanaka. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004. Pp. x, 225. $29.95.)

In December 1872, Japan's new Meiji government announced the abolition of the old lunar calendar in favor of the Gregorian solar calendar and mandated the use of the twenty-four-hour clock to divide and measure the day. The embrace of "world time" made possible "the politico-economic reformulation of the archipelago" (4). It also encouraged--indeed, according to the author demanded--a reformulation of the past as well. The new system of calibrating time was uniform and universal in contrast to the heterogeneous, bounded systems of the pre-Meiji period. It created, Stefan Tanaka says, a notion of progress, a teleology in which the past became...

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