We have for the first time achieved a survey of attitudes to time and expressions of time in various sectors of medieval Japanese society. Our systematic, bottom-up investigation into the expressions of time (chronographies), time regimes, economies and policies of time (chronopolicies), and theories/concepts of time (chrononoetics) has revealed the plurality of temporal notions and paradigms not only between different domains, but often within strongly related texts and single authors. This is a clear break with the received view that premodern, non-Western societies had a largely intuitive approach to time. Contrary to received views, we have demonstrated the existence of quantitative, linear notions of time and their importance to technical documents or chronopolicies, but also as elements in documentation eg. of religious qualification. We could show how, depending on the context, quantitative determination of time is often used to identify certain attributes important to the task at hand—which may be religious, political, martial, economical, or aesthetic. In the practical dimension, we noticed that punctuality and speed were important in various contexts, but that time regimes did not regulate activities beyond the scale of a modern half hour. In monasteries especially, this helped members of the congregation to concentrate on the current activity—evidently a way of coordinating actions towards shared goals that is more beneficial to individual well-being than ‘running against the clock’
While we had expected to find a clear gender divide in the perception and expression of time due to the generally patriarchal organisation of medieval society, we found that female agents used the same modes of expression and showed the same attitudes as men when they were in charge of, for example, economic or administrative affairs.
