'The Bells of Old Tokyo'

choi

Heller McAlpin, Of Time and the City; An American writer in Tokyo seeks out vestiges of the old city of Edo, especially the bells that kept the hours for the Tokugawa shoguns. Wall Street Journal, Dec 31, 2019
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the ... he-city-11577750990
(book review on Anna Sherman, The Bells of Old Tokyo; Meditations on time and a city. Picardo, Aug 13, 2019)

Quote (there is no need to read the rest, which is unavailable without payment):

(a) "Ms Sherman, who was born in Little Rock, Ark, and studied classics at Wellesley College and Oxford University, moved to Tokyo in 2001, determined to learn Japanese. Inspired by composer Hiroshi Yoshimura's 2003 book 'Edo's Bells of Time'——about the temple bells which sounded the hours until the end of the Tokugawa shogunate in 1868—she sets out on foot to locate Tokyo's remaining bell towers amidst the modern, 'anonymous, interc' high-rises that have grown up around them.

"For centuries, Ms Sherman explains, time in Japan was considered cyclical, and was rooted in a sequence of 12 animals from the Zodiac, beginning with the Rat at 11 p.m. to 1 a.m. and ending, at 9 p.m., with the Boar. But with the restoration of Imperial Japan, 'time was torn away from nature.' Abolished by Emperor Meiji in 1972, the Zodiac clock was replaced with Western time-keeping and calendars; instead of the peal of temple bells, a noonday gun was fired from the palace. 'The idea of time itself changed,' Ms Sherman writes. 'It became mechanical.'

(b) "After she moves back to England
Ms Sherman has a nose for interesting stories, and each district yields its own fascinating slice of Japanese history. In Nihonbashi, the first Bell of Time 時の鐘 rang for some 250 years from within the Tokugawa shogunate's brutal Kodenmacho prison, where tens of thousands of people died between the 1610s, when it was built, through 1876, soon after the last shogun left the city and the jail was moved westward to Ichigaya 市谷.

(c) "This book reminds us repeatedly that Tokyo is no stranger to cataclysms. Ms Sherman writes of the fires that decimated the city after the 1923 earthquake and the 1945 bombardments. Visiting the Tokyo Air Raid Museum in Kitasuna, she movingly quotes at length from the testimonial of a guide who was 8 years old on the March night in 1945 when more than 700,000 bombs were dropped on the city, killing some 80,000-100,000 people in a devastating conflagration, more than in either Nagasaki or Hiroshima.

(d) "Ms Sherman doesn't divulge much about herself, but 'The Bell of Old Tokyo' concludes with an astonishing revelation: Over tea with the sculptor Tatsuo Miyajima 宮島 達男 * * * she tells him that she grew up in a household without clocks. (She ran up phone bills calling the bank to ask the time.)

Note:
(a)
(i) Hiroshi Yoshimura  吉村 弘
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshi_Yoshimura
(1940 – 2003)
(ii) His book, written in Japanese, is not translated into English.
(A) 大江戸時の鐘. 音歩記 (春秋社, 2002年). (音歩記 is a subtitle.)
(B) 音歩?
• 韻脚
https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/韻脚
("verse（韻文、詩）における脚（pes; foot）は、韻脚（いんきゃく）、詩脚（しきゃく）あるいは音歩と訳され、詩のrhythm（リズム、律動）の基本単位として、多くのmeter（韻律、格調）に用いられる。  例えば「Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?」（ウィリアム・シェイクスピア『Sonnet 18』）は、5つの韻脚から成っている。（「//」は韻脚の区切りで、太字は強いアクセント）。  Shall I // com-pare // thee to // a sum- // mer's day?")

my translation: 脚（[Latin noun masculine:] pes; [English:] foot in a verse [also known as stanza; namely a block of words and a poem has several blocks] of a poetry is translated [into Japanese, as 韻脚, 詩脚 or 音歩, and, as the basic unit of rhythm. A meters contains multiple feet. For example, Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?」(William Shakespeare 『Sonnet 18』） is composed of five feet （「//」partitions feet, and boldface signals accent）.  [With Japanese pronunciation of futa, 太 is an adjective meaning fat (person, cat etc).]

A poem may have several verses. A verse looks like a block or a paragraph) of words.
• poetry
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetry
("The unit is composed of syllables, and is usually two, three, or four syllables in length. The most common feet in English are the iamb [with two syllables], trochee, dactyl, and anapest"/ section 2 Elements, section 2.1 Prosody, section 2.1.2 Meters: "In the Western poetic tradition, meters are customarily grouped according to a characteristic metrical foot and the number of feet per line")
# Click "metrical foot" and we will reach foot (prosody)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot_(prosody)
# To explain the concept of meter in poetry, I will use iamb (poetry)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iamb_(poetry)
(section 3 Types of meter: dimeter is a meter with two feet in a line)
• prosody (n; etymology): "the patterns of rhythm and sound used in poetry"
https://www.lexico.com/definition/prosody
(iii) Amy Chavez, Telling Time with Animals. Japan Times, Oct 22, 2011
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/com ... -time-with-animals/
(" 'Meet me in the fourth division of the hour of the horse' is a much more interesting way to say 'Meet me between 12:30 and 1:00 p.m.' Each set of two hours has four divisions, making each division 30 minutes long. The fourth division of the hour of the horse is not as exact as saying '12:45' * * * At the beginning of the Chinese zodiac is the rat, who has been assigned the hours of 11 p.m. to 1 a.m. No surprise there — rats like to come out at night after everyone has gone to sleep")

choi

(b)
(i) Japanese-English dictionary:
* toki no kane 時の鐘 【ときのかね】 (n) "hour bell"
    ^ Compare    tokei 時計 (P); 土圭 【とけい】 (n): "watch; clock; timepiece"  
(Until Meiji Restoration, the term 土圭 (pronounced tokei) was used in Japan, having adopted from China. 時計 (similarly pronounced; because 時's Chinese and Japanese pronunciations are "ji" and "toki," respectively) came into use after the Restoration. 語源由来辞典.gogen-allguide.com/to/tokei.html ("「時計」は当て字で、本来「とけい」は     「土圭」と表記した。 * * * 漢語が重視された幕末から明治初期に * * *" 漢語が重視された幕末 means: in the waning years of shogunate that took a serious view of 漢語 -- implying Meiji era, no so much.)
    ^ 鐘 in Japanese is always bell, never clock.
* den-ma 伝馬 【てんま】 (n): "post horse"

(c) Kodenmachō, Nihonbashi  日本橋小伝馬町
https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/日本橋小伝馬町
(section 2 歴史, section 2.1 地名の由来: "名主・宮辺又四郎が伝馬役を司ったことに由来する"/ section 2.2 史跡: 伝馬町牢屋敷")
(i) my translation: Name origin of the place: 宮辺又四郎 worked in post office, hence the name
(ii) 屋敷 in Japanese means mansion.
(iii) Nihonbashi is both a bridge, and a neighborhood around that bridge -- in Tokyo.
(iv) 伝馬 is defined in (b).

(d) Ichigaya  市谷 or 市ケ谷, which was named after, because the neighborhood included, "市ヶ谷孫四郎の領地." (The "ichi" and "ya" are Japanese pronunciations of kanji 市 (meaning market only, not city) and 谷, respectively. Pronounced "ga," ケ here functions the same as "no" (meaning of).

(e)
(i) Tokyo Air Raid Museum is actually
Center of the Tokyo Raids and War Damage  東京大空襲・戦災資料センター
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ce ... aids_and_War_Damage
(ii) Kitasuna 北砂 is a neighborhood in 東京都江東区.
(iii) Bombing of Tokyohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo
("Operation Meetinghouse, which was conducted on the night of 9–10 March 1945, is regarded as the single most destructive bombing raid in human history. * * * B-29 raids from those islands began on 17 November 1944, and lasted until 15 August 1945, the day of Japanese surrender. Over 50% of Tokyo's industry was spread out among residential and commercial neighborhoods; firebombing [from various air raids] cut the whole city's output in half") (footnote omitted)