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Abstract
The essay will explore new understandings of time in daily life coincident with the onset of urbanization and availability of medical treatment in urban areas in late sixteenth century Japan, focusing on the cities of Ōsaka and Kyoto. The primary source for the essay is a contemporary diary (Tokitsune kyōki) that provides a near-daily record of activity over a period of twenty years.
The essay will explore such topics as: reporting of medical symptoms, keeping track of the progress of ailments, the keeping by patients of longer-term records of medicines and their use; times reported for physician – patient interactions, which shed light on activity time in daily life; references to, and speculation on the need to note, time of arrival and departure for trips or attendance at events; and the apparent new rhythms of time consciousness associated with regular medicinal ingestion as part of a long-term health maintenance regimen.
Abstract
The article proposes the rudiments of a framework for the analysis of social conditions in which time is most likely to be experienced as a problem. To do this, we start from a circumscription of the idea of temporal discomfort, a type of experience of time lived by the actors themselves as a problem or suffering. Based on this clarification ten forms of temporal discomfort are then differentiated, which include different meanings of “lack of time” but also phenomena such as temporal emptiness or problematic relationships with the past and the future. It is then postulated that all these discomforts can be interpreted as a product of contradictions between wanting, duty and power, factors that are socially constituted and are, therefore, different in different structural positions.