Keeping time in the eternal ephemeral
How Japan’s unique perspective on the passage of time inspires the craft and design of watchmaking
A renowned haiku by Edo-period master Koshigaya Gozan reads: “The snow of yesterday / That fell like cherry blossoms / Is water once again.” This haiku encapsulates a quintessential Japanese sensibility—an acute awareness of life’s transience and a deep appreciation for the beauty in every moment. This profound regard for impermanence, known as mujo, inspires the Japanese to live each moment fully, with deep reverence for nature’s rhythms.
Transience is a central theme in Japanese culture, evoking renewal and celebration. The delicate snowflakes and blossoms mentioned in the haiku reappear each year, symbolising the eternal cycles of nature.
This deep appreciation of time is embodied in every Grand Seiko watch, where craftsmanship and design converge to evoke a profound emotional response. It is especially captured in Grand Seiko’s Spring Drive, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. A hallmark of this movement is the smooth glide of its seconds hand, which moves around the dial without the ticking seen in typical mechanical watches, expressing the natural flow of time itself.
Its appeal has stood the test of time, as it powers some of Grand Seiko’s most premium watches, including the Shunbun, Snowflake and Omiwatari, which are designed to embody the Japanese philosophy of nature and life.
The deep appreciation of time is embodied in every Grand Seiko watch, where craftsmanship and design converge to evoke a profound emotional response.
In Japan, the very notion of the beauty of fleeting moments lives in harmonious tension with enduring traditions of renewal. Nowhere is this vision more keenly felt than in the life of cherry blossoms, which fall at their moment of greatest beauty, and whose return every year is a source of rejoicing.
The Grand Seiko Shunbun (SBGA413), named after the vernal equinox, captures a distinctive Japanese appreciation for the eternal ephemeral during hanami (flower viewing) season. The dial’s texture and pale pink hue evoke the moment after the spring equinox when petals scattered by wind swirl downriver, moving beyond the beauty of blossoms to express the bittersweet joy woven into the transient nature of time.
Meanwhile, the Grand Seiko Snowflake (SBGA211) evokes the lightness and brilliance of snow covering the Hotaka mountain range in Nagano during winter. The design preserves the evanescent life of snowflakes with exceptional skill, capturing their luminosity in the finely textured dial, created through a special silver-plating process.
In the Shinshu region, each winter, there is a starkly beautiful phenomenon in which ice ridges form on Lake Suwa, one of Japan’s most celebrated lakes. Steeped in local spirituality and lore, the ridges are said to be the mark of “the crossing of the gods” over the frozen waters of the lake. The Omiwatari (SBGY007) draws inspiration from the local myth of gods walking on ice, with the dial’s colour and texture mirroring the undulating ridges of Lake Suwa, evoking the transient beauty of the season and timeless tales of gods.
In each watch, we find Japan’s celebrated tradition of monozukuri — the art of making things — inspiring Grand Seiko craftspeople known as takumi to pursue ultimate limits of quality. As in other Japanese forms of beauty, relentless technical mastery results in a unique melding of artistry and nature.
The three watches merge the craftsmanship of traditional mechanical watchmaking with state-of-the-art timekeeping precision, anchored in the Spring Drive. The Spring Drive combines a spring-driven movement with advanced electronic technology, with its power deriving solely from the mainspring, which drives a series of gears. This helps it realise a precision of +15 to -15 seconds per months, which is equivalent to +1 to -1 seconds per day, while having a power reserve of approximately 72 hours — a feat made possible because Grand Seiko is among the few manufacturers with expertise in mechanical and electronic watchmaking. While the seamless glide of the seconds hand, driven by the brand’s proprietary 9R Spring Drive, mirrors the natural flow of time, the meticulously-crafted dials elicit emotions tied to nature’s beauty.
This integration of automatic and mechanical elements reminds us to appreciate each living moment, despite it being fleeting - or perhaps, because it is fleeting. After all, transience also means renewal and celebration. Since the fragile snowflakes and blossoms referred to in Gozan’s poem recur each year, they also become a symbol of the eternal laws of natural cycles.