The rock star of Grand Seiko watchmaking

Moments after entering the room, Takuma Kawauchiya is on his haunches, unwrapping his company’s greatest treasure with a parent’s endless adoration for a newborn.

The Japanese rock musician turned master watchmaker’s hands move with the precision of a stage magician. A final layer of diapers is folded and Kawauchiya places the big seiko Kodo in the center of a dark blue felt lined tray. The company’s most complicated watch, incorporating a constant-force tourbillon to achieve an extraordinary level of precision, has won one of the industry’s highest honors: the 2022 Chronometry Award at the Geneva Watchmaking Grand Prix. And he’s leading the narrative that when it comes to fine watchmaking, Japan means business.

After a decade of development, countless refinements, and painstaking months of assembly, this particular version (one of 20 to be made) of Kawauchiya’s creation is nearing completion. His leash is not attached yet. Small finishing details are still pending. Some vital quality tests are still pending. Above all this is silence. The unawakened Kodo exudes an aura of waiting energy: a pure kinetic infused by Kawauchiya’s undisguised reserves.

But for now, the ‘heartbeat’ of the £310,000 Kodo, the tourbillon mechanism for which this watch is named, has yet to kick off. “There are times when I feel like he is my son, but he belongs to the customer,” Kawauchiya says, turning the Kodo over and reflecting on the bittersweet moment it will pass to the American customer who ordered it last year.

The room where this exchange takes place is a room with high windows high up in the Grand Seiko studio in the city of Shizukuishi in northern Japan. The building is as much a part of the history of Kodo and the change in the Grand Seiko brand as Kawauchiya itself. It opened with an inevitably low fanfare during the pandemic and was designed by the celebrated architect Kengo Kuma. The place is obsessed with the use of local wood, and determined in its attempt to provide a natural nest for the perfection of monozukuri, or crafts. The precise lines of its beams are modulated to house its occupants with a sense of both regularity and proximity to nature and its rhythms. The clean room, where the watches are assembled, is unusually large. In particular, anyone working indoors can look up from their desks for a clear view of a tree-studded plain at the foot of Mount Iwate’s vast snow-covered cone.

This is a 63-year-old luxury watch company, born out of the larger 142-year-old parent, Seiko, which has decided that it belongs not just on the highest slopes of luxury watchmaking, but at its absolute pinnacle. “Luxury is not something created out of necessity,” Kawauchiya says of the ethos, “but out of a dream. It may feel like we’re doing something a little different than we’ve done in the past, but it’s not that strange in the overall Seiko story,” she continues. “We are always challenging things.”

An hour before his interview, Kawauchiya could be found sitting in deep concentration at one of the clean room desks: wearing the same white lab coat and face mask as his colleagues, but somehow standing out. He is literally a watchmaking rock star and now one of Japan’s most powerful symbols of how creative spark can alternate between wildly different genres. The studio is one of several places where he works, alternating his time between the studio at Shizukuishi and Seiko House Ginza.

And it all happened, Kawauchiya says, because of a Google search.

In 2000, Kawauchiya left the Tokyo Institute of Technology, primarily interested in a career in music. He was a guitarist in a band and, unlike most of his student cohort, had no interest in joining a Japanese company. “I played guitar in the band until I was 30 and then it broke up. I had very little interest in watches, but while I was wondering what to do, my mother told me that I might be better suited to become a watchmaker than a musician because of my manual dexterity,” says Kawauchiya.

He was taken aback by her suggestion, knowing little about the industry and wondering if the job of “watchmaker” even existed in this day and age. “So I googled it and it turned out not only was there one, but there were schools where you could learn the trade,” he says. He applied to a school run by Rolex, half imagining that by the time he graduated, he could build a career in the field of watch repair and after-sales service. As it happens, Seiko offered him a job.

I feel like it’s my son, but it’s from the client

Not long after joining Seiko Instruments, it became clear that Kawauchiya was posted to the company’s R&D center in Matsudo, just outside Tokyo. Here, he would begin the eight-year process of developing the Kodo mechanism. By 2012, he had the mechanism in his head, but still lacked the know-how to fuse it with the design, which was run in a different part of the Seiko company empire.

After designing a prototype, he took the advice of a fellow specialist and began the process of micro-refinements and commissioning components from the craftsmen working at Seiko Watchmaking Corporation. By 2014, Kawauchiya was able to begin designing the movement, again acknowledging that there were large gaps in knowledge of it that could only be filled with months of study. “However, from the very beginning, the idea of ​​when this would become an actual watch was exciting and exhilarating. In the beginning, when I was doing presentations, we never talked about marketing the product…a lot of people thought it would be a bit difficult. We just relied solely on the feeling that it would be amazing if we could get it out there,” says Kawauchiya.

The Kodo is an achievement that should be salutary for everyone else, perhaps a statement of intent for the future. “I can’t think of anything Grand Seiko has ever done that’s the same,” he says. Nick FoulkesPresident of the Jury of the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève and HTSI contributing editor. “It’s as radical looking as it is technically impressive.” expert auctioneer Geoffroy Ader, also a member of the jury, says: “It proves that mechanical watches and their complexity are driving the luxury market – pushing boundaries and boundaries is Seiko’s new vision. But it really doesn’t surprise me that she is from Japan, since her culture is so deeply involved in tradition and also in crafts throughout the centuries.”

Kawauchiya’s time at watchmaking school immersed him deeply in what he calls “the Swiss way.” But he too was instilled in the Seiko way. “I feel like the Swiss watch culture, the Japanese watch culture and what I bring to the table as a Japanese come together to create the watch. I’ve never felt the need to do something that’s 100 percent Japanese… I try to reinterpret the good influences I’ve absorbed from Switzerland and other places. I express them through my own filter,” he says.

And he can’t resist highlighting Seiko’s superiority. Many tourbillons are being made in Switzerland: many think that it is a mechanism that offers high precision, but the experience is that this is often not the case. “I decided that if we applied Seiko’s technology to that, we could harness all that potential and make a precise tourbillon. I wanted to try that,” he says.

In previous interviews, Kawauchiya has complained about the fact that he cannot, on his salary, hope to have a Kodo. And yet one now seems to sit on his wrist. He takes it from her, with somewhat less care than the one he was unfinished with above, and places it on the wooden table. It’s a late-stage prototype: the mechanism is perfect, but its case is made of brass and titanium instead of the real platinum and titanium.

But it is, emphatically, yours. He insists that I listen to him: to experience the fascinating rhythm of the Kodo. This, he says, suddenly reverting to rock star mode, is where his experience comes into play. The heartbeat of the Kodo is, fundamentally, the ticking of musical time.

Leo Lewis is the FT’s Asia Business Editor