Grand Seiko’s rock star of watchmaking

Leo Lewis. Photography by Sybilla Patrizia

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

The hands of the Japanese rock musician-turned-maestro watchmaker move with the precision of a stage magician. A final layer of swaddling is folded away and Kawauchiya lays the Grand Seiko Kodo dead centre of a dark-blue, felt-lined tray. The company's most complicated watch, incorporating a constant-force tourbillon to achieve an extraordinary level of accuracy, has won one of the industry's highest honours – the 2022 Chronometry Prize at the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève. And it's spearheading the narrative that, when it comes to grand horlogerie, Japan means business.

After a decade of development, countless refinements and painstaking months of assembly, this particular version (one of only 20 that will be made) of Kawauchiya's creation is very nearly finished. Its strap is not yet attached. Tiny details of finish remain outstanding. A few vital quality tests are still pending. Overarching all this is the silence. The unwoken Kodo exudes an aura of energy-in-waiting – a pure kineticism infused by Kawauchiya's undisguised reserves of the stuff.

But for now, the Kodo's £310,000 "heartbeat" – the tourbillon mechanism after which this watch is named – has yet to be started. "There are times when I feel it is my child, but it belongs to the customer," says Kawauchiya, turning the Kodo over and pondering the bittersweet moment when it will pass to the US customer who ordered it last year.

The room where this exchange takes place is a high-windowed lounge atop Grand Seiko's studio in the northern Japanese town of Shizukuishi. The building is every bit as much a part of the Kodo story and the shift in the Grand Seiko brand as Kawauchiya himself. It opened to inevitably low fanfare during the pandemic and was designed by the celebrated architect Kengo Kuma. The place is obsessive in its use of local wood, and single-minded in its bid to provide a natural nest for the perfection of monozukuri, or craftsmanship. 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 expansive. In particular, anyone working inside can look up from their desks for a cleansing view of a tree-studded plain afoot the vast snowcapped cone of Mount Iwate.

This is a 63-year-old luxury watch company, born from the larger 142-year-old parent, Seiko, that has decided it belongs not just on the higher slopes of luxury watchmaking but at its absolute summit. "Luxury is not something created out of need," says Kawauchiya of the ethos, "but out of a dream. It may look as though we are doing something a little different than we did in the past, but it isn't all that strange in the overall history of Seiko," he continues. "We are always challenging things."

The Grand Seiko Kodo, £310,000

An hour before his interview, Kawauchiya was to be found poised in absolute concentration over one of the desks in the clean room: wearing the same white labcoat and facemask of his colleagues but somehow standing out. He is, literally, a rock star of horology and now one of Japan's most powerful symbols of how creative spark can flip between extremely different genres. The studio is one of several locations in which he works, switching his time between the studio in Shizukuishi and Seiko House Ginza.

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

In 2000, Kawauchiya left the Tokyo Institute of Technology interested primarily 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 more suited to becoming a watchmaker than a musician because of my manual dexterity," says Kawauchiya.

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

I feel it is my child, but it belongs to the customer

Not long after he joined Seiko Instruments, it became clear that Kawauchiya was destined for the company's R&D centre in Matsudo, on the outskirts of Tokyo. Here, he would begin the eight-year process of developing the mechanism of the Kodo. By 2012, he had the mechanism in his head but still lacked the knowledge to meld that with design, which was handled in a different part of the Seiko company empire.

After designing a prototype, he took advice from a specialist colleague and began the process of micro-refinements and commissioning the components from craftsmen all working within the Seiko Watchmaking Corporation. By 2014, Kawauchiya was able to start designing the movement, acknowledging again that there were huge gaps in his knowledge that could only be filled with months of study. "From the very start, though, the thought of the moment when this would become a real watch was thrilling and exhilarating. At the beginning, when I gave presentations, we never talked about commercialising the product… many people thought it would be a bit difficult. We just relied solely on the feeling that it would be an amazing thing if we could get it out there," says Kawauchiya.

The Kodo is an achievement that should be salutary to everyone else – a statement of intent for the future, maybe. "I can't think of anything Grand Seiko has done that is like it," says Nick Foulkes, president of the jury at 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 on the jury, says: "It proves that mechanical watches and their complexity are driving the luxury market – pushing limits and boundaries is the new vision at Seiko. But really it is no surprise for me from Japan, since its culture is so deeply involved in tradition and also craftsmanship throughout centuries."

Kawauchiya's time at watchmaking school caused him to dive deeply into what he calls "the Swiss way". But he was inculcated also in the Seiko way. "I feel that Swiss watch culture, Japanese watch culture and what I bring as a Japanese person all come together to create the watch. I have never felt I need to make something that is 100 per cent Japanese… I try to reinterpret the good influences I have absorbed from Switzerland and elsewhere. I express them through my own filter," he says.

And he cannot resist highlighting Seiko's superiority. There are many tourbillons being made in Switzerland: many think it is a mechanism that delivers high precision, but the experience is that often it does not. "I decided that if we applied Seiko's technology to that, we could draw out all that potential and make an accurate tourbillon. I wanted to prove that," he says.

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In previous interviews, Kawauchiya has bemoaned the fact that he cannot, on his salary, ever hope to own a Kodo. And yet, one now appears to sit on his wrist. He takes it off – somewhat less carefully than he did the unfinished one upstairs – and lays it on the wooden table. It is a late-stage prototype: the mechanism is perfect, but its casing is made of brass and titanium rather than the platinum and titanium of the real thing.

But it is, emphatically, his. He insists I listen to it: to experience the mesmerising beat of the Kodo. This, he says, suddenly back in the mode of rock star, is where his background comes in. The Kodo's heartbeat is, fundamentally, ticking in musical time.

Leo Lewis is the FT's Asia business editor