The Perfectionists

by Simon Winchester

  And still further, might there be a gathering of people—a society or a country somewhere in the world—who hold to a subtly different perspective on precision’s advantages, who question it as an ideal for aspiration? Might there be a people given to a deep-seated appreciation of the polar opposite of precision—a people who display a real affection, in other words, for the imprecise as well? A people who can perhaps hold dear the two ideas simultaneously, and yet retain, at all levels of society, a keen ability to function?

  Japan, I would argue, is just such a place.

  THIS IS A country known for its rigorous appreciation of the perfect, both today and in antiquity. The old temples of Kyoto, perhaps most famously, present an immense treasure-house of the architecturally impeccable, with every last beam and finial and spire and wooden gate designed and carved by ancients for whom perfectionism was deliberately meant as an enduring essential, and whose legacy still prompts silence and awe among those fortunate enough to witness it.

  And as with the ancient, so too with the modern. Most now think of modern Japan as dominating today’s world with her expertise in the making of objects of unyielding accuracy—of lenses immaculately ground and polished, of cameras fashioned to tolerances unattainable by most other manufacturers, of engines and measuring devices and space rockets and mechanical watches of a quality envied by all others—the Germans and the Swiss most notably—and for whom precision is a byword. In Japan it is more: precision in all things—not least in everyday railway services of such legendary punctuality that an apology had to be offered late in 2017 when an express left twenty seconds early—can be thought of as part of the national religion.

  And as Kyoto amply displays, there is nothing new about this reverence: the blade of a centuries-old samurai sword is to many Japanese no less sublime a piece of engineering than are the more modern products of firms like Nikon and Canon and Seiko and Mitutoyo and Kyocera. Might it be possible that in Japan the very highest esteem was accorded both to the machined accuracy of today and to the hand-created craftwork of old?

  So I went off East, to investigate the possibility. Once in Tokyo I lit out for a pair of towns in the north of the country, to explore the conundrum. I put up at a hotel close to Tokyo Station to undertake two train journeys out into the Honshu countryside. The first was to visit the Seiko wristwatch factory in the sprawling city of Morioka, and where I suspected I might get some kind of answer.

  AT THE MAIN railway station in Morioka, a northern Japanese city of a quarter of a million nestled under the slopes of a classically shaped volcano named Mount Iwate, there are gift shops where you can buy examples of the most revered product of the region, a bulbous, black hammered-iron teakettle known as a tetsubin. Local ironworkers have been casting and pummeling out these utensils for centuries, a reminder that, in Japan at least, beauty is manifest in the mundane, the everyday.

  For although so much of today’s Japan is steeped in the technological wonders of high-precision modernity—the gleaming high-speed bullet trains are a familiar example, being impeccably made and smoothly run, their workings silent, reliable, safe, and fast and their schedules invariably kept—a sizable fraction of the Japanese people remains vocally and demonstratively proud of its homage to craft, fervent in its admiration for those who make, sell, buy, collect, or simply choose to own objects of great and classical beauty, no matter how outwardly ordinary and no matter how imperfect. The quality and design of the handmade tetsubin of Morioka are known the length of the land, and all who see a new-bought example will cluck approving sounds, and well know where it is you have been visiting.

  Yet that is a holdover from yesterday. In more modern times, the city of Morioka has become known for another, more up-to-date product, one that reflects, in the same way as do the hand-hewn teakettle and the precisely wrought railway train, the curious duality that Japan displays in its esteem for manufactured items of rare quality. Morioka has since the last war been the manufacturing headquarters for the Seiko watch company—and the duality of both effort and attitude toward this firm’s products can be seen plainly, and in vivid demonstration, on the adjacent sides of a single unadorned wall on the second floor of the main Seiko factory building.

  THE ORIGIN MYTH of the company is a beguiling one. Its founder, Kintaro Hattori, was born in central Tokyo in the late nineteenth century and grew up in a nation that was undergoing a swift and profound change—and was himself, in consequence, influenced by two very different sets of manners and customs. When he was born, in 1860, the emperor Mutsuhito* was still a shadowy figure cloistered scores of miles away in Kyoto, and the shogunate still ruled from the Japanese capital, which at the time was named Edo. By the time the boy was eight, however, all Japan had changed, was now stumbling toward modernity: the last shogun had abdicated; the emperor had moved to what was now to be called Tokyo, the eastern capital; and reform and modernization (which, in many senses, meant at least temporary Westernization) were on all sides.

  Among these reforms was a subject that the teenage Hattori found especially fascinating: the passage of time. The boy had developed an infatuation with clocks, a topic which in the Japan of the day was a matter of exceptional complexity. For Japanese timekeeping was unique. Clockmakers had learned the basics of mechanical horology from visiting Jesuits, but these clerics threw their hands up in puzzlement at the fugitive nature of the local version of timekeeping. Hours in Old Japan were of varying lengths. Clocks’ bell strikes were, by Western standards, strangely disarranged: six peals at sunset, nine at midnight, eight and then seven in the moments before dawn. There were different periods of time, too, that depended on the seasons and that required at least two balance mechanisms within each clock, and several faces. Even more faces (as many as six) were needed once Western time began to infiltrate the systems of old, in the days when reformists wanted to be able to tell their hour at the same moment as old-timers required to know theirs. The young Hattori, an apprentice to a Ginza clockmaker from 1873 on, was thus pitched into a ferment of variant accuracies and clashing systems that would serve him in later life far better than, at the time, he could have imagined.

  For, by 1881, when, with savings and a little family money, he put down a deposit on the rent for a small watch, clock, and jewelry shop in Kyobashi, not far from the brand-new Tokyo Station—railways had come to Japan in 1872, with a British-built line from Tokyo to Yokohama, nine trains daily—Japan was starting to embrace Western timekeeping standards, too. Almost from the day he opened his store, Hattori would happily accept the older wadokei clocks that customers brought in for repair, but he would much more happily sell the clocks and pocket watches that displayed the twelve-hour units and sixty-second minutes of the West, and that, to the young man’s good fortune, suddenly became all the rage. There might not yet be much money about, but among the Tokyo middle class, there were usually sufficient funds for a pocket watch, and most men of affairs, who were starting to wear Western clothes now, in contented defiance of the shoguns’ old customs, liked to be able to pull a fob watch from their waistcoat pocket and tell the time Western-style.

  K. Hattori and Company prospered. Within four years, Hattori was importing the most sophisticated of Swiss and German clocks and pocket watches. He set up a company to make timepieces himself, and called it Seikosha, or (by some translations) “the House of Exquisite Workmanship.” With careful investment and slow and steady expansion (and a commitment to the business philosophy of vertical integration, whereby a firm owns or has control of most of the companies that provide its parts or raw materials), it can fairly be said that Hattori flourished.

  To recount his rise leaves one almost breathless. He set up an American-style factory for the mass production of clocks, employing the same principle of interchangeable parts that had been born in New England two centuries before. By 1909, Hattori’s concept of vertical integration was refined to the point where every single component of every single timepiece was made by a firm he owned, jus
t as they still are today. By the turn of the century, his company had become the biggest mass producer of clocks in the country, and was by then exporting, mainly sending Japanese-made wall clocks to China. After clocks came the production-line pocket watches, most famously in 1910, with a line that some might now regard as ominously prescient, it being called the Empire. Then, in 1913, came the more innocent-sounding Laurel, the company’s first small and rugged watch, designed to be worn on the wrist, an advantage for soldiers, allowing them to time their simultaneous battlefield risings from the trenches.

  Hattori’s showcase for his products was a huge main store and showroom that he had built in Ginza, a shopping district in Tokyo, and that sported, perhaps for the first time in Japan, a clock tower, Hattori believing in the PR advantage to be gained when passersby glanced up and saw the name “Hattori and Company” each time they checked the hour.

  Yet, like so much of Tokyo, this grand structure was comprehensively ruined in the Great Kanto Earthquake (and subsequent fires) of 1923, whereupon Hattori decided not just to rebuild but, according to today’s Seiko management, to replace every single one of the 1,500 pocket watches he then had in his repair shop. A mass of coagulated metal in a display case in the company museum in northeastern Tokyo is purported to be the melted remains of watches then under service; all, it is said, were replaced free of charge. The rebuilt Seiko headquarters still stands today, on what has become one of the very busiest of corner blocks in Ginza, and though it was long since sold to a department store, the tower, very much a local landmark, with its boldly illuminated clock, is under perpetual contract to display the name “Seiko.” That name had replaced the name “Hattori and Company,” which in turn had replaced “Seikosha,” a name that enjoyed only a brief run. “Seiko,” ever since, has been deemed sufficient.

  Seiko—the name in Japanese means “exquisite workmanship” or by some translations “precise”—invented the quartz watch in the 1960s. The clock over one of the firm’s early twentieth-century buildings, now a landmark department store, in Ginza, a district in central Tokyo, is said to be connected to an atomic clock and offers the exact time to millions of commuters and shoppers passing beneath it.

  Photograph courtesy of Oleksiy Maksymenko Photography.

  And because Japanese Railways had shortly before selected Seiko pocket watches as the official timekeeper of the country’s vast and enviably punctual transport network, and because all watches in Ginza and beyond are still checked against the clock that looms over the elegant Wako department store—Gucci to the left, Mikimoto pearls to the right—one can fairly say that all Japan now runs to Seiko time. Not for nothing is the firm’s name taken by many Japanese to mean “precision,” for there surely cannot be a more precise country, anywhere.

  THE DUALITY, HOWEVER, remains. It is a conflict that seemingly lies somewhere deep down and unspoken, buried in the Japanese psyche, between, on the one hand, a perceived modern need for the perfect and, on the other, a lingering fondness for the imperfect, and with amiable disputes about the weight that society accords each. There is a Japanese term for the liking for the natural and the ragged and the undermachined: wabi-sabi, an aesthetic sensibility wherein asymmetry and roughness and impermanence are accorded every bit as much weight as are the exact, the immaculate, and the precise. And that is precisely what I had come north to explore: that other perspective, whether precision itself is a force for universal good, or whether there is, in essence, a third way.

  It was within Seiko particularly that this genial argument became fully exposed, and it did so with one of the firm’s—one might say with one of the twentieth-century world’s—great inventions. For it was the quartz digital watch, launched by Seiko as the Astron on Christmas Day 1969, that brought this divide fully into the open.

  QUARTZ IS A crystal that will oscillate dramatically when placed in an enveloping electric field, and moreover, it will do so by an exactly known number of vibrations a second. It can thus be easily adapted to display with great accuracy the passage of time, and has been used in timekeeping since the discovery of the phenomenon in the late 1920s—although, in the years immediately after the concept’s discovery, such clocks as were made had to be contained in boxes that were at least the size of a telephone kiosk.

  Seiko was, however, secretly experimenting with miniaturizing the technology in the 1950s, under the unimaginative code name 59A. In 1958, the firm managed to supply a quartz clock for a Nagoya radio station; it had to be housed in a case the size of a filing cabinet. By the early 1960s, however, Seiko quartz clocks were small enough to be installed in the cockpits of the first generation of bullet trains. By 1964, when Seiko won the timekeeping contract for that year’s Olympic Games, there was growing confidence that, sooner or later, the engineers would produce a movement small enough to fit on a wristband—as indeed they did, just five years later. The Astron, with a pleasingly retro face and by then with a gearless, springless, and almost wheelless digital interior, was everything that was expected: an inexpensive, unbreakable, unshockable, heat-resistant, waterproof, and uncannily accurate wristwatch that, for a while, was the most precise timepiece ever made.

  It was unshockable only in a purely mechanical sense, for its introduction sent economic and social shock waves coursing through the world’s watchmaking community. Within no more than five years, it very nearly brought the Swiss industry to its knees. Suddenly, no one seemed to want to buy a heavy, noisily ticking device that had to be adjusted every day to keep it to time. Instead, and for much less of an outlay, you could buy a watch that never had to be wound and that had, instead of a dial with hands, a display of an ever-unrolling cascade of numbers that told the time to fractions of a second and with accuracies that had hitherto been known only in laboratories. Before what became known in horological circles as the 1969 quartz revolution, or shock, or crisis, there had been sixteen hundred Swiss watch houses. By the end of the next decade, there were only six hundred, and the workforce had been cut to a quarter of its former level.

  Seiko was, however, never able to win a patent for its invention, and its own scientists would readily admit that the quartz timekeeping movement was a child of many parents. The firm was quite content to allow the stricken rest of the watchmaking world to play catch-up—as indeed it did. The arrival of the Swatch phenomenon in 1983 brought Switzerland roaring back to life, but by this time, Seiko was well established, pumping out quartz watches at a formidable rate, and making formidable profits in the process.

  All this caused the firm’s management—the new generations of the Hattori family were still involved, though in a respected supervisory role, as Seiko had gone public in the 1980s—to suffer something of a crisis of conscience, a crisis that was brought about by the firm’s philosophical reverence for the watchmaker’s craft.

  And herein lies the dilemma, one that is well illustrated within this one watch company and, at the same time, also reflected and refracted throughout Japan more generally, and which also helps to address the more philosophical problem that I started to think about on my long desert journey from the LIGO site to Seattle Airport.

  For might there be in the wider world, in truth, simply too much precision? Might today’s singular devotion to mechanical exactitude be clouding a valued but very different component of the human condition, one that, as a result, is being allowed to vanish?

  ON THE DAY I visited the Seiko watch company’s principal factory in Morioka in early autumn, rain was falling, and low clouds obscured the usually quite dramatic view of Mount Iwate. A senior executive had accompanied me on the train up from the south, apologizing for weather that I told him I found quite agreeable after the steam bath of Tokyo. The plant is a little way west of town, in a bamboo park, and the trees dripped softly in the cool drizzle, small pathways vanishing alluringly into the mist.

  More than twenty-five thousand quartz watches, known for their accuracy and reasonable price, come off a robotic assembly line at the main Seik
o plant in Morioka, northern Japan, every day.

  Photograph courtesy of Museumsfoto/Creative Commons BY-SA-3.0 de.

  The factory is modern, stark, unadorned, peaceful. Down at reception level, and in the various rooms where I was taken for briefings, all was unusually quiet, almost as though the plant were on holiday and people had been brought in simply to speak to me.

  I needn’t have worried. One floor above, where the watches were made, there were people and machines in abundance—though a still very serene abundance, with not a room in which earplugs or masks were ever needed, and everywhere an overarching impression of silence, cleanliness, and efficiency. It was more like an academy than an industrial plant, more a cathedral to the watchmaking religion than something as vulgar as a factory.

  A quartet of escorts took me first to the electronic side of the plant, to see where the quartz watches were fashioned. There is a long corridor with glass picture windows through which visitors can observe the long production line, all at waist height, where the components are assembled by robots. The line itself snakes around the warehouse-size room, different portions of the room assigned to different models of watches, but the processes of making them all essentially the same. Components are fed in from hoppers onto tracks and are then, like train cars being inserted onto a moving railroad, injected into the passing line at just the moment they are required, such that once weight sensors detect their presence on the blank, the tools at this or that part of the line perform the tiny tasks that secure each particular component to its precise position in the watch. The blank with its first part is then moved to a station where a second component is added, and then to a third, and so on and on. The long snake of machinery is monitored by young men and women in white gowns—the room is kept as free of dust as possible—who make an adjustment here or add a droplet of lubricant there, bending down slightly every few moments to minister to the engine work of the never-stopping line.