Japanese horology

Wadokei

Mechanical clocks arrived with Jesuit missionaries in the 16th century. Because Japan divided day and night into six hours each whose length varied with the season, clockmakers developed wadokei with adjustable foliots, movable hour plates and, later, double foliots that switched automatically at dawn and dusk.

Meiji industrialisation

Japan adopted equal hours with the Gregorian calendar in 1873. Kintarō Hattori opened a watch shop in Tokyo in 1881 and founded the Seikosha factory in 1892; Seikosha's Laurel (1913) was the first Japanese wristwatch. Citizen grew from the Shokosha Watch Research Institute of 1918.

The quartz revolution

Seiko's Quartz Astron of December 1969 was the first quartz wristwatch sold to the public. Japanese firms led the mass production of quartz analogue and digital watches in the 1970s and introduced solar (1976), kinetic (1988) and Spring Drive (1999) technologies.

Timeline

1. 1551Francis Xavier presents a mechanical clock to the daimyo Ōuchi Yoshitaka in Japan
2. 17th c.Japanese clockmakers adapt mechanical clocks to unequal temporal hours (wadokei)
3. 1881Kintarō Hattori opens his watch shop in Tokyo, origin of Seiko — Seiko
4. 1913Seikosha's Laurel, the first wristwatch made in Japan — Seiko
5. 1969Seiko Quartz Astron released — Seiko Quartz Astron 35SQ
6. 1973Seiko 06LC, a six-digit liquid-crystal digital watch — Seiko
7. 1976Citizen's first light-powered analogue quartz watch — Citizen
8. 1988Seiko's kinetic (AGS) watch charges a quartz movement with a rotor — Seiko
9. 1999Seiko Spring Drive regulates a mainspring-driven watch with a quartz reference — Seiko