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How Japan put itself on the world watch map
History & Masterpieces

How Japan put itself on the world watch map

Thursday, 20 March 2014
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Grégory Gardinetti
Expert and Historian in Watchmaking

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From the end of the nineteenth century, Japan developed an important clock and watch industry. The 150th anniversary of diplomatic relations which Switzerland and Japan are celebrating this year is an opportunity to look back at this rapid rise and see how it crossed paths with Swiss production.

After a long period of isolation, in 1853 Japan opened its borders to international trade and, in the process, became a new market to conquer. Opportunities were such that in 1860 the Union Horlogère, an association of some fifty watch manufacturers from the Neuchâtel mountains, opened a trading post in Yokohama. This transitional period from the feudal Edo era to the modern Meiji era was no less challenging for Swiss watch exports. While Western countries measured time in hours of equal length, the Japanese preferred a system of unequal hours. For this reason, while Swiss watches were admired for their mechanical prowess, they were considered more as objects for show than for indicating the time. Indeed, demand for watches was so low that the trading post floundered and the Union Horlogère closed it in July 1863. Still, this initial failure didn’t prevent the Union’s president Aimé Humbert, appointed by the Swiss Federal Council to lead a diplomatic mission to Japan, from concluding a treaty of friendship and trade with the Edo government in 1864. Accordingly, this year marks the 150th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the two countries.
It wasn’t until 1873 that Japan adopted the Gregorian calendar, three centuries after France, and the system of 24 equal hours. Suddenly the watch was able to assert itself as a functional and useful item, all the more so as the country’s fast-developing railroads further necessitated a means of measuring time. Better still, Japan’s economic growth in the late nineteenth century helped boost imports of Swiss timepieces. Despite this, only a handful of general traders had outposts in Japan, and timepieces accounted for just a small part of their business. By the early 1900s, as it became more usual to carry a watch, demand increased, prompting new traders to set up in Japan while big local merchants began to import watches directly from Switzerland.
The birth of an industry
Alongside the imported Swiss watches that dominated the market, Japan developed its own watchmaking industry. The Osaka Watch Manufacturing Co. was set up in 1889. An offshoot of Otay Watch, a Japanese-Californian venture, it was the first company to launch series production of pocket watches. Watchmaker and jeweller Hattori Kintaro, who opened his first repair business in Ginza in 1877 and his first shop in 1881, established the Seikosha Clock Factory, now Seiko, in 1892. Initially the company manufactured wall clocks before branching out into pocket watches as of 1895.
An impressive number of manufacturers saw daylight during this decade, including Aichi Clock & Electrical Instrument, Meiji Clock, Owari Precision Watch Manufacturing and Pocket Watch Manufacturing. Protectionist measures introduced in 1899 benefited Japan’s home-grown production with the result that Japanese-made watches quickly supplanted foreign imports. The Laurel, the first wristwatch from Seiko, was launched in 1913. Citizen Watch Co. was set up five years later. Japan’s clock and watch industry was fast expanding and would prosper until the Second World War whose ravages brought production to its knees.
But Japan would rebuild itself, watchmaking included. In 1947 the Japanese Clock and Watch Association was founded, and the country began exporting its production worldwide. The following year, the Economic Stabilization Board set out a five-year plan to relaunch the watch industry, completed by a three-year mechanical automation programme to boost production. On the eve of the Korean War (1950-1953), watch production in Japan had reached a level of quality on a par with the global market’s demands. The Korean War and the Vietnam War (1964-1975) would transform Japan into one of the main watch exporting countries of that time.
From quartz to mechanical
Circa 1980, mechanical timekeeping had been pushed to its furthest limits. Electrical, then quartz and ultimately atomic time measurement would contribute to research into fractioning the second, resulting in a new definition of the second in 1967. Building on this revolutionary approach to time measurement, Seiko unveiled its first quartz wristwatch, the Astron, on Christmas Day 1969. Its Swiss counterpart, Bêta 21, after an initial prototype in 1966, made its debut as a finished watch at the Basel watch fair a year later. Henceforth, watchmaking turned its back on its mechanical heritage in favour of electrical energy. This new direction would take its toll on Switzerland’s watch segment, which would soon be forced to follow Japan’s lead as the new master of electronic timekeeping.
The rest, as they say, is history. Come the late 1980s, early 1990s, collectors and enthusiasts championed the return of the traditional mechanical watch. Japan seized the opportunity, at the same time incorporating the technology for which it is known. The Seiko Kinetic, for example, launched in 1988, is a combination of electrical and mechanical. A conventional quartz wristwatch, current is supplied to its battery by a system derived from a traditional self-winding mechanism. Each movement of the wearer’s wrist has an effect similar to that of a dynamo to charge the battery that drives the watch. Like the European watch industry, Japan witnessed a revival in its mechanical watchmaking from the late twentieth century. The Grand Seiko, the brand’s star product since 1960 and launched on European markets in 2007, captures these values. Today as in the past, Japanese timepieces are ready to take up the challenge and pit themselves against Switzerland’s foremost names in mechanical watchmaking.

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