Watchlords

Mention vintage Japanese watches and the mind usually autocompletes: Seiko. But there is another brand just as sibilant, storied and collectable that doesn’t get quite the same attention and that is Citizen. While it is Citizen’s quartz output that garners most interest these days (2019’s Eco-Drive Calibre 0100, +/- one second per year, anyone?), the company has serious mechanical watchmaking experience.

From a Japanese perspective, the first water-resistant watch was a Citizen and it arrived in 1959. Rather eloquently dubbed the “Parawater”, a term that lost out to the more prosaic “water resistant” in the early 1970s, Citizen demonstrated these watches’ properties by attaching them to buoys in the Sea Of Japan. The step from buoys to men's and women’s wrists and the creation of a dive watch happened soon afterwards. The Citizen Jet Autodater 120m has all the features you would expect from a dive watch: rotating, graduated bezel with a luminous pip at 12 o'clock; bold luminous hour markers against a black dial; and luminous hands.

https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/watches/a ... -autodater