How Seiko entered the very exclusive club of sports chronometry

Zagreb airport, September 1962

Masatoshi Tohyama, head of Seiko's research and development department, is on board a flight to Belgrade. He is expected by the Olympic Committee's Technical Commission to present the chronographs that Seiko has developed for the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo. The pressure is enormous and the responsibility immense. He still remembers how it all began.

Masatoshi Tohyama

In the spring of 1960, his colleague Saburou Inoue (one of the company's top executive) was away in Zurich when he received a telegram from its CEO, Shoji Hattori. “Tokyo will host the next Olympic Games. We want to be the official timer". Inoue-san sent a colleague to observe the Olympic Games in Rome in August 1960, as he had to deal with the dissatisfaction of new American customers with the newly imported Japanese products. In the end, he returned to Japan disheartened by the customer negative feedback, one store manager even shouting at him “And you dare to call it a watch?!”.

As he returned to his office after this difficult business trip, Shoji Hattori, the CEO, paid him a visit and asked him point-blank “So, are you ready? ‘Understanding that he wanted to talk about the project for the ’64 Olympics, Inoue-san politely retorted that this would not be possible... “And why not? You've got four years,” replies the CEO. “I'm sorry, but it's impossible. ”That was enough to send Hattori over the edge. “Our watches are now good enough for the whole world to know about! What do you mean 'it's impossible'?! I'll be back in a week and you'd better be ready!” then he turns on his heel and walks away...

Saburou Inoue

After the humiliation he suffered in the United States, Saburou Inoue knows that Seiko is not ready to take on such a task. He can already imagine the deluge of complaints that could rain down on the company, or even jeopardize the smooth running of these Olympic Games, the first to be held in Asia. Worse still, it's Japan's image that he fears will be shamed if he fails. The pressure is too great, and four years isn't enough at a time when computer simulations don't exist, and research and development are extremely time-consuming. The task seemed all the more insurmountable in that, unlike Longines or Omega, Seiko had never produced a chronograph specifically for sports timekeeping... But Shoji Hattori was convinced that Seiko would time the Tokyo Olympics - it had to be done. So he visits Saburou Inoue every week to ask the fateful question “So, are you ready?” until he finally, reluctantly, agrees.

A crackling voice echoes through the plane's loudspeakers: “We kindly ask all passengers to step off the plane while we refuel. You can leave your carry-on on your seat.” Masatoshi Tohyama hesitates. His small suitcase contains the 12 precious watches he has to present to the Olympic Committee, six stopwatches accurate to 1/5th of a second and six stopwatches accurate to 1/10th of a second. The flight attendants confirm that he can leave the case on his seat and that he'll find it intact after refuelling. But to his horror, when he returned to his seat a few minutes later, the suitcase had disappeared. Two whole years of hard work by hundreds of employees vanished in a matter of seconds, as did Seiko's only chance of timing the Olympic Games to be held in its own country. As heavy drops begin to bead on his forehead, as he thinks back to the hours spent with his colleagues.

Before the 1964 Olympics, timekeepers lined up at the finish line and each took a measurement. The official time was calculated by averaging the results obtained. The precision of Seiko stopwatches put an end to this bizarre organization.

He thinks back to his engineer friend Shoichiro Komaki and his stopwatch-triggering robot. He had used it to show that the differences in measurement obtained between different timekeepers in the same event were not due to the human factor, but to the very design of the chronographs of the time. He realized that even if a robot simultaneously triggered several stopwatches, be they Swiss or Japanese, there was a difference between all the measurements, due to the triggering mechanism.

He thinks back to his other engineer friend, Tatsuya Ishiwara, who had the idea of using a heart-shaped cam to start and stop the chrono, thus eliminating the timing discrepancies observed between different watches. Their ingenious and exemplary work, with the help of the latest technologies, created chronometers of exceptional quality and precision.

He also thinks back to the teams that worked so hard to develop chronographs accurate to 1/10th and even 1/100th, with escapements galloping at 36,000 and 360,000 beats per hour. For a year now, Seiko's three major factories have been sharing the development and production of huge clocks, quartz chronographs, instant printer chronographs and so on.

But fortunately, these few minutes of inattention on board the plane cost Masatoshi Tohyama and his parent company no damage, as his suitcase was soon found on the tarmac with his watches intact. More fear (surely one of the greatest of his life!) than harm. He quietly completed his journey to Belgrade, clutching his precious cargo.

Extract of a 1964 catalog

On the eve of the meeting with the Olympic Committee, the president of the Japanese Association of Athletics Federations asked to test the watches brought by Tohyama-san. And then, one of the six 1/5th stopwatches showed a problem with the synchronization of the hands, and the president of the AJFA immediately told him that if this happened tomorrow, the meeting would be over in no time... Tohyama-san therefore decided to eliminate the faulty stopwatch from his selection and, to even the score, also eliminated the 1/10th stopwatch with the weakest ticking sound. He will therefore present ten watches instead of twelve to the very demanding jury awaiting him a few hours later.

But poor Tohyama-san's misadventures don't end there... He learns that his watches will be handed over the next day to two expert timekeepers renowned for their intransigence, Messrs Pain and Paulen (secretary and president of the International Association of Athletics Federations), the latter with a reputation for always carrying a stopwatch with him and disputing official measurements when they deviate from his own. Quite a character...

While our engineer friend at Seiko tries to hide his stress, Mr. Paulen begins his ritual when it comes to testing a new chronograph: he grabs a watch in each hand and sets them off instantly. After a few seconds, he stops them and compares the difference between the two. He then starts them again, before stopping them after a few minutes and comparing again. Finally, he leaves them running for an hour and takes the final reading.

Picture from the Seiko Museum in Tokyo

Meanwhile, Tohyama-san shows the committee the different models his engineers are working on: each sport has its own model, whether it's field field hockey with its three 35-minute periods, basketball with its four quarter-times, rowing with its chrono that counts the number of rowing strokes per minute, or their brand-new split-second chronographs.

When the hour-long test comes to an end, Mr Paulen is shocked: the difference between the two chronos he's holding is less than 0.1 seconds. Tohyama-san explains the principle used by his friend Ishiwara to quench Mr Paulen's curiosity about such watches, and Mr Paulen is won over.

The committee makes a decision and explains to Masatoshi Tohyama that they are not giving Seiko the title of official timekeeper because the Games are being held in their own country, but because their chronographs are far better than any they had seen.

This is how Masatoshi Tohyama made Shoji Hattori's crazy project a reality, and offered Seiko the title of Official Timekeeper of the Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo.

Jesse Owens tests the Seiko chronograph with Shoji Hattori (left) and Reijiro Hattori (right) at an event in Tokyo in 1964.
Credit: The Ohio State University Archives

This landmark event in Seiko's history will have many repercussions for the future of the company. Not only did it mark the beginning of Seiko's rich history in sports chronometry, but it was also the occasion for them to release a large number of excellent watches, such as Japan's first wristwatch with chrono and column wheel, the famous single-pusher Crown Chronograph models (5717 and 5719) or the grail for Seiko chrono enthusiasts, the Count-Graph and its lap counter.

It was also during this competition that Seiko released the Crystal Chronometer QC-951, which was used not only for the Olympic Games, but also for expeditions to Antarctica, for the precision of Japan's high-speed trains, for public transport and for various armies. It also played a key role in the development of the world's first quartz watch, the Astron 35SQ.

Credit: Seiko Museum

Finally, it was also for the '64 Olympics that Seiko developed a printer that could instantly print race results. This technology was noticed by many, and gave rise to the Epson brand, which is just one of the many divisions of the Seiko group.

Click to scroll photos

Crédit: Seiko Museum