The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World

by Simon Winchester

  The line runs ceaselessly, day and night. Rather more than a thousand watches are made every hour, meeting the endless demands of the enormous export market Seiko has established, and from which it now makes the greatest portion of its profits. The vision of all these machines, like an enormous model railway layout, humming and whirring, clicking and whooshing and squealing as they cut, pressed, heated, scored, drilled, removed burrs, tightened screws, fastened faces to mechanisms, inserted glass onto dials and straps into brackets and completed watches into boxes, was mesmerizing indeed—though, in truth, it seemed to have little to do with actual watchmaking, and I suspect my hosts could discern a vague ennui in the expression on my face. “Behind this next wall,” an escort said with a smile, “there will be what you want.”

  In 1960, when the company was still making mechanical watches only, it created a top-of-the-line model it called the Grand Seiko. The watch was handmade to exacting standards, and it was old-fashioned, with a design that was manifestly not artificially retro but that looked the way it did simply because its designers were old-fashioned men, too. It sold well, it won all manner of certificates from a somewhat condescending Swiss judging body, but it was never released overseas and remained almost wholly unknown beyond Japan.

  Then came the revolution. Seiko invented the quartz watch in 1969, and put the Astron and its successors into full-scale production, and found that, as a result of its immediate success, it had been somewhat hoist with its own petard. The Grand Seiko mechanical watch became an immediate dud. Price was one factor. Accuracy was another—a quartz watch kept time to mere seconds a year, while a mechanical movement, much costlier, would be lucky not to gain or lose five seconds in a single day. All Japan, and all Seiko, swiftly lost interest in the model, sales plummeted, production was cut, elderly men and women who had been hand-making these watches for years were dismissed, and finally, in 1978, the line was abandoned.

  On the same floor as the machine assembly of cheap watches, a small team of skilled workers assembles mechanical Grand Seiko–model watches by hand. The team (seen here during one of the compulsory exercise breaks) makes about a hundred watches a day, using components that are all, from hands to hairsprings, made in Japan, also by Seiko.

  Except that—and this appears to be the decisive moment when a quintessentially Japanese devotion to craftsmanship was allowed to resurface—within a decade, the decision came down from the board to restart production. A halfhearted 1980s lipstick-on-a-pig attempt to make a quartz version of the Grand Seiko fizzled, whereupon the Hattoris realized, and did so without the dubious benefit of surveys and focus groups, that Japanese people had a lingering love affair with handmade mechanical watches, and would pay good money to support the kind of craftsmanship that would be necessary to make them again.

  Managers in the mid-1980s had retained the names and addresses of all the watchmakers they had sacked, just in case they were needed to repair any of the Grand Seikos then around. The word went out for them to return to work, and they promptly did, in droves. Those young enough stayed on for such time as they could, and while working assembling watches by hand once again, they also trained a new cadre of youngsters—who remain in the plant today, in workshops on the other side of the factory’s second-floor wall.

  Not a production line is in sight, nor a robot in view. Instead, viewable from a large sofa placed in front of this corridor’s picture window are two dozen enclosed workstations, small ebony-walled carrels each with a 270-degree workbench equipped with every imaginable essential of a modern watchmaker’s trade: powerful lights, magnifying lenses, computer screens, racks of personal tools, tweezers, minute screwdrivers, pin vises, burnishers, dust brushes, pincers, microscopes, ultrasonic cleaners, boxes of tiny jewels, spindles, gearwheels, mainsprings, timing devices. All these treasures are arranged with perfect tidiness and ease of access for the man or woman who, in white cotton cap and white cotton gown, sits in his or her custom-made chair, which rises to exactly the correct height for the forearms to be rested and the hands to be as comfortably placed as possible, and makes watches by hand.

  When I arrived at the window, every one of the watchmakers was silently peering through the illuminated lens before him or her at some unimaginably tiny piece of a watch-to-be—fully trained watchmakers here work to tolerances of a hundredth of a millimeter, better in some instances. All the pieces, oscillating balances to hairsprings, train plates to escape wheels, winding crowns to pallet forks, are made by hand behind yet another wall of the same building. With tiny tweezers, each of these craftsmen and -women could be seen fitting this piece into this minute hole, into that microscopic space, that tiny threaded notch. Most were bent down, concentrating fiercely on the task at hand. Once in a while, a watchmaker might look up, might glimpse a passing visitor, grin for a second, and then bow down once more and work on.

  Every hour, the entire studio breaks for ten minutes of exercise, and the men and women stand and stretch and limber up for another session hand-making some of the most unassumingly magnificent watches ever made. These watches may not be as famous as Patek or Rolex or Omega, but they consistently win all the Swiss timekeeping awards, and to those who know, they are of peerless quality.

  One of the watchmakers came out for a break: he was a slightly chubby, entirely affable man of forty-five named Tsutomi Ito, and he described himself as an expert on hairsprings. He loved the way they rippled sinuously when touched—if, of course, they had been perfectly made. He had been working at Seiko for most of his life, and imagined he would do so until his hands or his eyes gave up under the strain, which they currently showed no sign of doing. He was classified as a meister, one of just two at the plant.

  He had begun his career in the electronic watch section, helping to maintain the production line. His ambition had always been to make it to the mechanical watch studio, since human perfection was the essential component here, not the robotic efficiency of the quartz production line. He now completed just two, sometimes three watches a day. In the evenings, he went fly-fishing, and yes, he designed, made, and tied his own flies. He also collected fine wristwatches from around the world. He noticed my Rolex Explorer but would not comment on its quality. Did he like quartz watches? Well, he said, they are a lot more precise than the watches he made. Would he wear one? He shook his head, positively shuddering at the thought. And then he smiled, looked at his own watch, a Grand Seiko diver’s watch, mechanical, and stood, allowing how he had now to go back to his workstation. There was a hairspring to adjust, one that was being especially trying. He would like to finish it by closing time, or he would be late getting home. He looked at my Rolex as we shook hands, and gave what I could only suppose was a slightly sardonic smile.

  Seiko makes twenty-five thousand quartz watches each day, seven days a week. On a good day, Mr. Ito and his two dozen colleagues who make mechanical watches by hand from Monday to Friday turn out around one hundred twenty. In the reception area, a small glass case showed the very latest models, and a sign noted that, by application to the receptionist, the case could be unlocked, and it was possible to use a Visa card. For a second—for a single tick of a Grand Seiko mechanical—I hesitated. Would you take my Rolex in exchange, I asked, and the team of escorts in the lobby exploded in relieved laughter. I took that as a no. I stepped out into the warm rain and gazed down into one of the bamboo trails, at a view of subtle loveliness that faded into the cool autumn mist.

  IT WAS AN altogether much less attractive view that greeted me a few days later, when I made a second northward journey from Tokyo, to the coastal fishing port of Minamisanriku. One of the towns that had been wrecked by the Great Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami of March 11, 2011, and from which, more than six years later, it was still recovering.

  Before the tsunami roared in that chill afternoon, Minamisanriku was a prosperous and well-oiled fishing port, if declining slowly in population and importance. Though it stood at the head of a large sheltered bay, few of its fis
hermen troubled to venture out into the Pacific Ocean itself. There was no need. Just beyond the headland cliffs, the commingling of two marine currents, one warm, the other cold, created a marine environment that was amply suited to a wide variety of harvestable sea creatures.

  The local fishermen farmed oysters and scallops, octopus and salmon, and a peculiarly ugly creature called a hoya, or “sea pineapple,” which has something of a following among the more adventurous Tokyo chefs. The bounty would be put onto each evening train to the junction at Sendai, and then onto one of the southbound expresses to the city, two hundred miles away: bidders at the Tsukiji morning market would buy it for good prices. Minamisanriku was in consequence well off, contented, and settled—though eternally aware of the ocean beyond the cliffs and the violence it could do. Considerable damage had already been done by a tsunami in 1960. As it had been caused by an earthquake in Chile, the Japanese chose an Easter Island moai as an additional town mascot, to act as co-talisman with the more venerable figure of the town octopus.

  In no more than one hour on the March Friday in 2011, everything that had for so long been so settled about Minamisanriku was rendered into splintered driftwood, twisted iron, and broken and drowned bodies. Though, outwardly, similar violence wrecked a score of communities up and down the Tohoku coast, that in Minamisanriku had its own peculiar, local poignancy: one tragedy stood out, and made this community’s misery more public than many others’. A twenty-four-year-old woman named Miki Endo had been employed to warn the community of the inrushing waters, and on that cold March day, she remained dutifully at her post in the town’s Crisis Management Center as the freezing floodwater rose around her. Just as with the musicians on the Titanic, she carried on, sounding the sirens and playing her warning music and broadcasting details of the incoming waves’ heights and locations over the municipal loudspeakers, until the water shorted the power supply and the speakers went dead.

  Film clips show the waters climbing higher and higher up the center’s three stories, until figures can be seen gathering out on its flat roof. A few of them clamber up the radio antennas until only one or two remain; men can be seen holding on grimly and for hours, until the waters begin to drop. Behind them, in one scene, immense gray waterfalls gush through the upper windows of the town hospital, as apocalyptic a vision as it is possible to imagine. But there is silence from the loudspeakers, a lack of sound that tells of the fate of the drowned Endo, who remains the town’s local heroine today, for shouting out the warnings until she fell.

  The rust-red iron frame of the building in which she was entombed still stands. There is currently a vigorous debate about whether it should stay, as a reminder, like the dome at Hiroshima. Many locals want it torn down. The town has yet to decide.

  Endo was but one of some twelve hundred who died at Minamisanriku, out of a total population of seventeen thousand. The steep hills surrounding the fishing port provided sanctuary for many thousands who either lived there among the pine and cedar and, most crucially, bamboo forests, or else who drove frantically up roads that normally require tire chains in the icy weather—and it did snow that afternoon, though mercifully, only a little. From up high, they watched helplessly as their community was inundated by seven great wave fronts and was methodically wrecked beyond recognition. Then they all came downhill and, by all accounts, patiently and uncomplainingly cleared up the mess and got back to work.

  What, one might ask, did they have to work with once they came down from the hills? What remained standing after the waves had stilled? Precious little, for certain, that had ever been made with precision.

  Precious little was left in Minamisanriku that had been made of titanium, or of steel, or of glass. Ships with super-precise engine work had been wrecked; cars loaded with exact pieces of instruments and apparatus had been tossed like chaff; electronic devices with microprocessors at their hearts and which held millions of tiny transistors all failed; and buildings such as Miki Endo’s were torn apart and twisted and left to rust. The evidence of the impermanence of the precise was everywhere.

  The more perfect of the trees, the cedars and the pines—they also were ruined, splintering and collapsing. Many were the human victims who were crushed by their falling trunks, or else were carried along with a floating mass of wrecked driftwood and taken out to sea on the ebb, to be lost forever.

  The imprecise, though, was still there. In the forests around town there still were groves of bamboo, growing in abundance. The cedars had gone, splintered to shreds. The pines were devastated. But the bamboo was still there—imprecise, imperfect, but surviving.

  Bamboo, used in so many aspects of Chinese and Japanese daily life (as baskets, clothes, tools, fans, shelters, arrows, hats, armor, building material), is a grass, though it appears most commonly as a strong and fast-growing tree. It is renowned for its resilience and flexibility, and it is always certain to grow back and to flourish and then to be useful to mankind for myriad purposes—no matter how many more tsunamis may be inflicted upon it. It bends, it springs back, and it grows again. And in Minamisanriku, it was either still there, bent and bloodied but unbowed, or else it so swiftly reemerged from seed, growing three feet a day once the sun was up and some warmth began to seep back into the springtime earth, that it immediately became of practical use. It is a plant at once mathematically imperfect and yet quite perfectly useful.

  As I was leaving New York for Japan in the autumn of 2017, an exhibition was opening at the Metropolitan Museum of Art devoted entirely to the art of bamboo. Most of what was on show (to thousands, for it was a dramatically curated and in consequence a very popular exhibition) was more decorative than strictly practical: many flower baskets and tea ceremony utensils, gift boxes and small items of headgear. But the exhibition also reminded visitors of the existence of what are known as Living National Treasures, Japan’s near-unique way of rewarding and recognizing those in society who are creators of the very best of handmade craft.

  The very existence of such officially honored artists serves as a reminder that there truly is in this regard an ineffable difference about Japan, a singular quality that uniquely marks out the popular attitude toward, in this case, dimensional integrity. For while there is indeed a national reverence in that country for the precise, there is also a formal recognition of the inestimable value to society of craftsmanship, of the true worth of the handmade and the flexibly imprecise.

  The intricacies of handcrafted bamboo—here a modern Japanese decorative item from an exhibition held in New York City in 2017—demonstrate Japan’s pride in the handmade and the imprecise, despite the country’s known aptitude for high-precision manufacturing.

  Photograph courtesy of Metropolitan Museum of Art.

  Living National Treasures represent a corps d’élite of men and women, usually of considerable age, who have over their lifetimes developed and honed skills in such defiantly imprecise arts as lacquerware and ceramics and wood-and metalwork, and who are officially accorded honored status in society.

  The virtue central to each of their skills has to be that of patience, both the patience demanded in the learning of the craft and the patience required in the making of the art.

  Urushi, the Japanese name for the ancient craft of lacquerware, for example, offers a perfect illustration of the creation of the imperfect, by way of a skill that has been honed over seven millennia of Japanese history.

  The natural material central to the lacquerware art is the highly toxic sap of a tall deciduous tree, Toxicodendron vernicifluum,* which is known principally in China and India but which for centuries has been cultivated in fiercely protected forests in Japan and Korea. Using small blades and buckets and a great deal of care, sap collectors incise tiny feather-like grooves in each tree and collect the drips of sap before each wound heals; the tree is then left unscathed for the following season. Half a cup of sap per tree is the general rule, and each resulting container of the sticky moistness, with pigment adding various shades from d
eep red to deep yellow to tobacco brown, is tightly sealed until the urushi artist calls it up to begin its application, burnishing and decorating.

  Urushi, or handmade lacquerware, is the product of an ancient and respected craft in Japan, one that has been practiced for millennia. The items are made over many months, from the resin of the fiercely protected lacquer tree. So eager is Japan to keep alive the tenets of craftsmanship that it awards to the most honored makers of these beautiful items the title of “Living National Treasure.”

  Photograph courtesy of the Japan Folk-Craft Museum.

  Generally, wood is used as a base—camphor and cypress wood commonly, air-dried for as long as seven years to ensure no warping or cracking, and then cut and shaped and shaved until it is so thin as to be almost transparent: one can certainly see light and dark through it, or discern the fingers of the artist’s hand, if not perhaps read the fine print of the day’s Asahi Shimbun through it.

  Then the lacquer itself is applied to this fragile wooden substrate, painted on with a combination of animal-hair brushes and slender, flat spatulas, done in the thinnest possible of layers, with each stratum left to dry in warm, damp air, both to encourage oxidation and to stimulate the release of the various enzymes that help harden and render permanent the layers, one by one. Maybe as many as twenty layers will be painted on, one atop the other, and smoothed and polished each time, so that each layer is painted onto an unruffled surface, the smoothness of one reflected up onto the smoothness of the next, until a hard, creamy silkiness of texture and surface disguises and also augments the near-invisible structure of the wood below.