Natural time
Relentless mechanical accuracy is a cornerstone of Western horology, but it’s only part of the story. Alexy Karenowska and Roger Michel explore the traditional Japanese approach to timekeeping
Furniture maker George Nakashima summed up his artisanal philosophy thus: “Every piece of wood has only one ideal use. The woodworker’s job is to shape the wood to find that ideal.” Today, Nakashima’s tables can fetch £150,000 and his workshop near New Hope, Pennsylvania (now run by his daughter Mira) is on the US National Register of Historic Places.
Nakashima allowed the shapes and patterns of the natural world – the burls, knots and grain of his planks – to guide his designs. In so doing, he tapped into an ancient Japanese aesthetic impulse sometimes described as shibui: the simple and unobtrusive beauty of nature.
Over time, this approach has seeped into almost every dimension of Japanese artistic and industrial design, including, unsurprisingly, horology. The wadokei, or traditional Japanese clock, derives its ever-changing tempo from the seasons. Daytime and nighttime are divided into six periods, the lengths of which vary depending on the time of year.
This means the hours are literally shorter during fleeting winter days, and the opposite in summer. In Japan, time – much like Nakshima’s tables and chairs – bends to the patterns of nature.
In the West, however, the relentless clock keeps the same unwavering beat regardless of nature’s rhythms. For this, we can thank the Euclidean precision of the ancient Greeks. While their Egyptian cultural forebears divided day and night into Japanesestyle elastic units, the Greeks insisted on a fixed-length hour. And so it has been in the West ever since.
But this is not to say there is nothing of humanity in these fixed units of time. This is nowhere more evident than in that most basic unit of all, tirelessly ticked out by most every clock and watch ever built: the humble second.
Arguably the base unit of all base units, unlike other fundamental quantities – metres, kilogrammes, amps – the second exists not just as a metric of convenience, but as a subdivision of human experience that came to life as a concept long before devices existed to allow it to be accurately measured. First displayed on clocks in the 16th century, the second is a unit of natural time – a relatable subdivision of our day-today reality. It is a synthetic unit by which we organise the small moments of our lives.
In recognition of its exalted station, science has lavished a lot of attention on the second. Until the 1950s, the precise length was defined by reference to the mean solar day, the average period of rotation of the Earth around the sun. Then, in 1956 the second was briefly redefined by the International Committee on Weights and Measures as 1/31,556,925.9747 of the length of the tropical year 1900. Finally, in 1967, the second became 9,192,631,770 transitions between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of a caesium-133 atom.
And with that, the atomic clock standard was born. Exploiting its extraordinary precision, the Deep Space Atomic Clock, Nasa’s contemporary state-of-the-art portable timekeeper, is accurate to within a second in 10 million years. If the first humans had been issued Deep Space clocks just as they split from the chimps, they would be out by only a fraction of a second today. To put that in perspective, John Harrison’s fabled H4 clock (which marks its 260th anniversary this year) – the timekeeper that made modern navigation techniques possible – was a whopping five seconds slow at the end of its 81-day journey from England to Jamaica. However, despite its obvious appeal to our inherited desire for Greek perfection, this obsession with ever greater accuracy seems squarely at odds with Nakashima’s approach to furniture-making – and with the Japanese design aesthetic generally. More importantly, maybe it’s not so good for our souls. Acclaimed watchmaker Hajime Asaoka was once asked, “What makes a watch Japanese?” Recalling the natural imperfections that shaped the unique contours of Nakshima’s creations, he replied, “[It] is the individuality that exists within the essence of watchmaking”. A perfect second – or even the quest for the same – feels like an assault on that individuality.
In the end, a wristwatch is a very personal thing. We wear it pressed against our pulse, we power it with the movement of our bodies, we inscribe it with the details of our highest achievements, we pass it on to our children when we die. If imperfection defines humanity, shouldn’t we want a little of that in these special and very symbolic objects?
As the poet Alexander Pope said: “Tis with our judgments as our watches, none go just alike, yet each believes his own.” Asaoka, perhaps, had it just about right.
If imperfection defines humanity, shouldn’t we want a little of that in these very symbolic objects?