Grand Seiko

Grand Seiko began in Japan in 1960 as Seiko's most exacting mechanical wristwatch. The first model came from Suwa Seikosha, one of the company's manufacturing operations. Daini Seikosha later made Grand Seikos too. The name covered work from different factories, not a single small workshop.

Accuracy was a serious competitive business. Suwa and Daini entered movements in the Swiss observatory trials, where they could be measured against established European makers. At Geneva in 1968, Suwa took fourth through tenth place in the wristwatch category. Quartz entries occupied the first three places. The result demonstrated how far Japanese mechanical watchmaking had come, while also showing the technology that would overtake it.

Appearance was being developed just as deliberately. Daini's 44GS of 1967 established the broad polished planes and sharply defined edges still associated with Grand Seiko. Suwa's automatic 62GS, introduced the same year, used a different case with no separate bezel around the glass. There was already more than one way for a Grand Seiko to look.

The company did not remain exclusively mechanical. Its first quartz Grand Seiko arrived in 1988. A new mechanical movement followed in 1998, after a twenty-year gap. Spring Drive added a third system in 2004: a watch powered by a mainspring but regulated electronically, without a battery.

Spring Drive had taken far longer to develop than those dates suggest. Engineer Yoshikazu Akahane filed a patent in 1978 for a spring-powered, electronically regulated watch. Getting the electronics to run on the tiny amount of available energy proved difficult enough for the project to be shelved.

Grand Seiko's account describes a team that continued working on it. Osamu Takahashi joined in 1993; circuit designer Kunio Koike arrived in 1997. Improvements to the generator, circuits and power consumption eventually made a working system possible. By then Akahane was a senior executive and could give the project formal backing. The later automatic version became Grand Seiko's 9R movement.

In 2017, Grand Seiko was presented as a separate brand, still within the Seiko group. Its name moved to the top of the dial. The same maker offered traditional mechanical movements, high-accuracy quartz and the spring-powered, electronically regulated Spring Drive.