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Christopher Harding explores the Tokyo of a century ago, the bustling, cosmopolitan capital of a growing empire, where the meaning of \u2018time\u2019 was hotly contested. Critics attacked the relentless \u2018clock time\u2019 of new factories and businesses and the \u2018leisure time\u2019 of youngsters who favoured cafes or poetry rather than exerting themselves in empire-building. Buddhist thinkers and folklorists claimed that Japan must rediscover its natural sense of time as seasonal and cyclical, rather than mechanical.

New Generation Thinker Christopher Harding contemplates the way these attempts at escape became useful fodder for Japan\u2019s militarist ideologues \u2013 working for the Emperor, his palace tucked away amongst the trees in central Tokyo, whose own sense of time stretched back into myth and from there into divinity.

Recorded as part of Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival in front of an audience at Sage Gateshead. \nNew Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to find academics who can turn their research into radio.

Producer: Luke Mulhall