In Japan With Grand Seiko’s Greatest Watchmaker
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A glib generalisation perhaps, but like policemen and politicians, after a time all watchmakers begin to look much the same.
It could be the uniform: an ill-fitting white polyester coat, a pair of rubbery, dust-free crocs and a bulbous loupe tend to be the giveaways, but so too the indoor-job complexion and a fondness for hairstyles of the early 1990s.
It’s a gentle place, watchmaking, largely untroubled by here-today-gone-tomorrow 21st century predilections.
Which is why I don’t imagine memories of my first encounter with Takuma Kawauchiya, the brilliant watchmaker behind Grand Seiko’s award-winning “Kodo”, will fade in a hurry.
I meet Kawauchiya on an unseasonably hot autumnal day in Tokyo’s chi-chi Ginza district and in Seiko House, one of the Japanese capital’s oldest and most iconic buildings, and long-time headquarters of the country’s preeminent watchmaker.
He’s come to address a small crowd of journalists and enters the room with a Gibson Dove – Elvis and Tom Petty’s acoustic guitar of choice – slung over his shoulder, strumming The Rolling Stones’ "Start Me Up", a tune surely more common to a ring walk or Mick Jagger’s bedroom than a watchmaker’s atelier. But as quickly becomes apparent, there is little that is common about Kawauchiya.
The 46-year-old began his career as a professional musician, deliberately eschewing corporate life to tour with a number of Japanese jazz, rock and pop artists, until for reasons that don’t really become clear, aged 30 he decided to pack in the itinerant life of a rocker and become a watchmaker, as sedentary pursuit as there is.
He qualified with a diploma from the Swiss watchmaking school WOSTEP in 2010 and went from there straight into Seiko’s R&D department, developing mechanical movements.
Two years later, an idea came to him that would define (so far) his second career and transform the way the watch world thought of Grand Seiko. After a decade of development, on its release at the Watches and Wonders trade fair in Geneva in 2022, the Kodo Constant-Force Tourbillon SLGT003 was a revelation, becoming the first mechanical watch to arrange a tourbillon and a constant-force mechanism on a single axis, beating the Swiss establishment at their own game.
Working in tandem, these revered, highly technical devices made Kodo one of the most precise mechanical wristwatches ever made, accurate to -1/+1 seconds a day for the duration of a 50-hour period, roughly two thirds of the watch’s total power reserve. (Normally, accuracy wanes as a power reserve runs down, a challenge a constant force mechanism overcomes.)
To the uninitiated, the achievement might sound arbitrary. But consider that to carry the valued chronometer certification for accuracy – as issued by the independent Swiss Chronometer Testing Institute – a watch need only be accurate to -4/+6 seconds a day.
And then that rather like getting your golf handicap down once you hit low single figures, or finding an extra tenth once you can run the hundred metres in under 10 seconds, reducing accuracy beyond this point becomes incrementally difficult.
Taking a total of eight seconds off chronometer levels, and then managing to maintain that accuracy over 50 hours is, in mechanical watchmaking terms, monumental.
At the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève in 2022, the Jury awarded Kodo the prestigious Chronometry Prize. I was on the Jury that year: Kodo was a shoo-in, as it would no doubt have been in almost any other year since the award was first issued.
But if those are the facts of the watch, where did the idea come from? And how does a rock musician come to solve a watchmaking conundrum no one in the 500-year history of mechanical watchmaking has managed before?
“Luck?” Kawauchiya offers impishly.
“I’m an engineer and an artist,” he goes on, more seriously, adding that in 2000 and before he became a musician he graduated from the Tokyo Institute of Technology with a degree in industrial engineering. “When you combine two mechanisms together the movement becomes quite thick,” he continues. “Maybe that’s why it had never been done before.”
Perhaps.
But then the Kodo’s Caliber 9ST1 is no lunk. It’s 7.98mm front to back, not at all fat, and made visually lighter still by being skeletonised, exquisitely finished and laid out with near perfect symmetry. The whole watch is 12.9mm thick, slimmer than most chronograph watches.
More remarkably still, the Kodo was Grand Seiko’s first complication (it’s since released a chronograph) in the 62 years since the dial name was established as a vehicle for Seiko’s most advanced and most accurate watchmaking creations.
But that’s not the whole story.
Because for Kawauchiya, the Kodo is as much a musical object as a timekeeping device. Its escapement beats at eight beats per second, but it’s finely tuned to capture the “16th note”, a term used in music to describe the rapid quarter beats (semiquavers) often found in the rhythms of rock and pop music.
The ticking sound of the watch was, Kawauchiya says, extremely important to him.
“For me, the emotional value in a watch is in the sound a watch mechanism makes,” he says. “That’s an art form in itself.”
Kodo, indeed, is Japanese for “heartbeat”.
To make his point he picks up his Gibson again, hits play on a recording of the fast-ticking sound of the Kodo’s movement, and using that as his backing track, begins rocking out again.
"Smoke On the Water…"
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