A very beautiful clock, very intelligently built, including an inertia regulating system via two sliding weights on the balance arm, the indexing of the count wheel which was solved differently than in European clocks - the gathering pallet acting directly on the toothed count wheel, lifting one tooth every strike.The Japanese method of time telling was based on the natural day from dawn to dusk. Day and night were each divided into six segments of differing length. The day segments, for example, were longer in summer and shorter in winter. For this reason the hour markers had to be adjustable. The dial begins with the number "9" and goes backwards (9,8,7,6,5,4), because the Japanese consider that 9 is a magic number. Since a clock was an important and mysterious object in itself, it was desirable to havethe mystical number present in every hour, as well as to directly attribute it to midnight and noon. The other hours were multiplied by the number 9 and the second digit of the product was taken as the clock hour (for example, hour 2 was in fact 8 because 2 x 9 = 18). In Japan every hour had a name, similar to our weeks, in which the days are not numbered from 1 to 7, but have names: Monday to Sunday. Traditional Japanese hours were named after the Chinese zodiacal signs, midnight (bottom of thedial) being "rat", midday (top of the dial) "horse", sunrise (to the left) "hare", sunset (to the right) "cock", and so on. Timepieces with mechanical escapements were introduced to Japan by the Jesuits in the 16th century. The Japanese quickly grasped the basic concept and started producing their own clocks at the beginning of the 17th century.