Taro Tanaka beyond Grand Seiko

Vintage Seiko and Grand Seiko enthusiasts are mostly familiar with this name: Taro Tanaka.

Hired in 1959 by K Hattori (later Seiko Watch Corporation), he was the first industrial designer to join the company's ranks. His name is intimately linked with Grand Seiko, since it was he who drew up the rules of the famous “Design Grammar” or “Seiko style”, the set of aesthetic principles that gave the brand its visual identity.

But Taro Tanaka is a great misunderstood. Indeed, to reduce his work to Grand Seiko is a big mistake. I'd also add that the “Grammar of Design” itself is often misunderstood, even though it's the thing he's best known for.

The impact Taro Tanaka has had on Seiko as a whole is absolutely immense, and it's safe to say that Seiko wouldn't be where they are today without him.

So pour yourself a glass of your favorite beverage, get out your best tweed jacket and adjust your moustache, today we're going to walk in the footsteps of the great Taro Tanaka! And we'll also take the opportunity to debunk a few preconceived ideas in the process.

Credit Image: The Seiko Book

As we saw a short while ago, Taro Tanaka benefited from an exceptional mentor in the person of Ren Tanaka (they share the country's most used surname so I won't call them by their first names, sorry).

Ren Tanaka has always been Taro Tanaka's direct superior and has had a major influence on his career, from start to finish. While his mentor gave Seiko its corporate image (logo, official colors, standardization of image), Taro Tanaka, as we shall see, gave the watches a visual identity. Between them, they literally changed the face of Seiko from 1960 onwards.

I think it's important to go back over Taro Tanaka's career in a few points.

I'd like to make it clear that it's not possible to go into detail on every subject in a single article, so today you'll have to make do with an overview to try and highlight Taro Tanaka's importance beyond Grand Seiko.

1959, young Taro Tanaka, a recent graduate of the Chiba School of Engineering in Industrial Design, joins K Hattori.

Myth number 1: Taro Tanaka was an employee of Suwa Seikosha

It's not true. I don't know where this false information comes from, but it's not true. Taro Tanaka headed the design department of what was to become Seiko Watch Corporation, working with both Suwa and Daini. He would issue directives to both factories, and they would propose movements or ideas. Hierarchically, Taro Tanaka was at the top of the pyramid as far as design was concerned. He worked at the group's headquarters in Ginza. It was this location that prompted him to join Seiko.

Seiko Watch Corporation headquarters in Ginza today - Credit Anthony Kable www.plus9time.com

In 1960, after settling in and discovering the different workings of the company, the young Tanaka found himself faced with two problems. The first was that he was required to draw inspiration from Swiss watches when designing timepieces, which clearly restricted the designers' creativity. The second is more complex. In those days, designers weren't allowed to do as they pleased, but had to use specific measurements for the watch case, dial and glass, based on a chart from which they couldn't deviate. But since that's not enough, they also use a unit of measurement inherited from the french Ancient Empire: the line. A line corresponds to a twelfth of an inch, the equivalent of 2.2558 mm. The smallest unit is the quarter line, or 0.564mm. And to top it all off, these dimensions are then rounded, which makes the task very complicated, especially as drawings, prototypes and final products are all at different size scales, giving rise to real headaches between line/mm conversion and rounded figures manipulated in all directions.

The chart used by Seiko designers before Taro Tanaka
Credit: The Horological International Correspondance nº427 - 1995

But the problems with the line system don't stop there. Most of the subcontractors who made the cases and dials had switched to the metric system and worked to a tolerance of around 0.05mm, ten times more accurate than the smallest division of a line.

Between random measurements and the difference in tolerance between the design and the concept, the manufacture of exterior parts is therefore not very precise, leading to a lot of wasted material during manufacture and a very approximate fit between parts. The direct consequences are obvious: it's very difficult to make modern, high-quality products in large numbers that are truly watertight and durable (especially in a country as humid as Japan).

There are many other problems with this system, but I won't go into too much detail, since you've already got the general idea: the line and the design standards used are hellish.

Only two years after his arrival, Taro Tanaka revolutionized Seiko's approach to design by creating a new standard that would replace the old table imposed on designers and abandon the line. He got together with designers from K Hattori, Suwa Seikosha and Daini Seikosha - no more than 10 people in all - and developed this new millimetric standard, in agreement and collaboration with their subcontractors.

This new way of conceiving watches adopted in 1961 would fundamentally change the way things worked, and from a design point of view, Seiko would enter a new era, with much more modern designs and cases, and improved water-resistance. This new approach also laid the foundations for what was to become the “Grammar of Design”, but we'll come back to that later, first things first.

The first project that Taro Tanaka will be able to tackle with his new standard is proposed and directed by Ren Tanaka. The idea is to create a range of quality watches, mass-produced for the international market and targeted at young people. These watches will have everything to please them: water-resistance, automatic winding, day and date, a sporty but not extreme look, a watch that can be worn in all circumstances, at the beach, for sport, in the shower, at work. In short, absolutely everything you could ask for in a modern watch, and a little more. For its time, it's a high-quality, innovative product. But what's more, it will be offered at a very affordable price, since we're targeting young people here. And of course, it's Taro Tanaka who will be in charge of the design for this project, named by Ren Tanaka “Sportsmatic Five”, a project that would never have been possible without the new design standard imposed by Taro Tanaka.

Credit: Anthony Kable www.plus9time.com

The young designer had the revolutionary idea of placing the day and date in a single window at 3 o'clock. At the time, this complication was not commonplace, and the day of the week was usually shown in full in a window at 6 or 12 o'clock, like Rolex's famous Day Date (released only a few years earlier) for example. But in the '50s, Seiko's engineers worked hard to develop watches where information was grouped together: hours, minutes and seconds were displayed by hands all located in the center of the dial. You can read the time at a glance, in a much more ergonomic way. For Taro Tanaka, the same should apply to the day and date. This detail, quite important at the time, would become one of the brand's hallmarks.

The Sportsmatic 5 ref 41897 de 1963

Another feature of the Sportsmatic Five is the recessed crown at 4 o'clock, hidden to emphasize the efficiency of the automatic Magic Lever system introduced in 1958. Already used in the Seikomatic range, this feature would also become one of Seiko's symbols.

The first Sportsmatic 5 from 1963 was the first watch in the world to win the Good Design Award.

The Five range was an immediate worldwide success (thanks, among other things, to the Tokyo Olympics in '64), becoming a symbol in its own right for Seiko, with several tens of millions of watches produced over almost 60 years. They also played a decisive role in the boom in Japanese watchmaking in the '60s and in the Swiss watch crisis of the '70s and '80s, far more so than quartz! Another misconception to forget: it wasn't quartz that caused the Swiss watch crisis, but that's not today's topic...

One last point about the Seiko Five: according to Taro Tanaka himself, the 41897 from 1963 remains his most successful design to this day.

Myth 2: Taro Tanaka = Grand Seiko

As I said in my introduction, Taro Tanaka is too often summed up by his involvement in the design of the Grand Seiko, but he had other incredible achievements that helped give Seiko its image, as can be seen throughout this article.

But it's true that we can't talk about Taro Tanaka without mentioning the famous “Grammar of Design”...

Myth 3: Its real name is not grammar of design, but “Seiko style”.

The idea was born in Taro Tanaka's mind in 1962, when he compared Swiss watch production with the Seiko watches offered in Wako. A year earlier, he had developed Seiko's new design standard, which allowed for greater creativity and evolution in terms of design, but the brand was struggling to find its feet and the comparison with the Swiss was as inevitable as ever. He therefore decided to take the process a step further and draw up a set of specifications to give Seiko a style all its own and ensure the commercial success of these watches.

It's important to remember that in 1962, Grand Seiko was not a brand or a range, but a single model, Seiko's top-of-the-range model. So when Taro Tanaka began to look into the matter, his aim was to implement an aesthetic language specific to Seiko as a whole, hence the name “Seiko Style” (pronounced in English even in Japanese).

Myth 3bis: Design Grammar is unique to GS and KS...but...

Contrary to what you might think, the Seiko Style is not specific to Grand Seiko or King Seiko, since it is designed to give a visual identity and attract customers to the brand as a whole. But...but but but...one of the key features of Seiko Style is the use of perfectly flat surfaces, polished so as to be distortion-free - the famous Zaratsu. However, this kind of work requires real expertise and a great deal of time on the part of highly-skilled craftsmen, which is reflected in the watch's final price. These features are only fully exploited on the top-of-the-range King Seiko and Grand Seiko watches. This is not to say that the Seiko Style was not used to a lesser extent on the rest of the production line - quite the contrary. In fact, Seiko Style is a global philosophy, with different “currents” or applications, the most complete of which can be found in Grand Seiko watches from the 44GS upwards.

So, as we've just seen, the idea of the Seiko Style originated in Taro Tanaka's head in 1962. It's a common misconception that the idea came to him as an epiphany, one day while strolling along Tokyo's Champs Elysées, but this is not exactly the case.

Taro Tanaka uses a very specific expression when telling this story. He says that with the drab design of Seiko at the time, it was impossible to “surpass Switzerland”. In fact, these were not his words, but those of Shoji Hattori, president of the group since 1946, whose motto was “Catch up with and surpass Switzerland” (an expression taken up by Pierre-Yves Donzé for his fabulous book of the same name).

It's this idea of surpassing Switzerland that has driven the company for some years now, and which will be the driving force behind all its successes in the years to come. But in the meantime, Taro Tanaka is working to create a visual language that will enable Seiko to go beyond Switzerland and give its watches a recognizable, luxurious image.

Without going back over the various rules laid down by Taro Tanaka, the rest of the story is clear: the first watch to perfectly embody these rules is unanimously the 44GS, released...5 years later!

So it's fair to wonder what went on for 5 years! Especially when you look at the number of watches released between 1962 and 1967, you have every right to wonder to what extent the Seiko Style influenced them, or even if the 44GS really was the first watch to bear the “Grammar of Design” stamp.

Let's take the example of the second Grand Seiko released in 1963, the 57GSS. This was the first watch to benefit in part from the famous zaratsu polishing, and it shows some of the beginnings of the Seiko Style with its flat dial, double hour markers at 12 o'clock, bevelled hands and so on. But it doesn't tick all the boxes either, with lots of rounded and curved surfaces, its crown not integrated into the case, no inverted inclinations for the mid-part of the case etc. We can also think of King Seiko models such as the King Seiko Calendar (4402) or the Chronometer (4420), which hint at the gradual evolution of design at Seiko under the leadership of Taro Tanaka.

44KS Chronometer

Credit: Ikigai Watches

57GSS “Toshiba Special”
Credit: Ikigai Watches

It seems clear to me that during these 5 years of development, Taro Tanaka perfected what would become the famous “Grammar of Design” as we like to call it, fine-tuning certain rules (the flat dial dates from the new design standard in 1961) and gradually incorporating certain details into different watches, before culminating in the one that would be the most perfect expression, the famous 44GS from Daini Seikosha.

So I think we should see the Seiko Style not as an absolute truth established in 1962 and used in 1967, but as an idea that made its way into the mind of its creator to evolve and mature to its finest expression in Daini's masterpiece, the 44GS.

Taro Tanaka was a refined and elegant man, and this image fits perfectly with the image one might have of Grand Seiko. But he didn't just make dress watches, far from it! He also left his mark on Seiko's history with the Five range, as we've seen, but also with sports and professional watches.

He was responsible for the design of the numerous stop-watches released by Seiko for the 1964 Olympic Games, as well as their development for the 1972 Sapporo Winter Games. It's hard to imagine a more sporting pedigree for a watch than participation in two Olympic Games!

Updated model for the 72 Sapporo Winter Games
Credit: Seiko Museum

He was also behind a number of diver watches.

Seiko 6215 and 6159 300m

Credit: vintagewatchco.com

He designed Seiko's very first professional divers, the 6215 and the 6159-7000 the following year. He then spent 7 years working on the ultimate watch for professional divers, following a letter of complaint written by Hiroshi Oshima in 1968, a diver with the Japan Marine Industry Company, whose 6159-7000 had simply exploded when his capsule decompressed.

Taro Tanaka worked closely with divers in Hiroshima's Kure harbor (also known as Japan's largest naval base and home to the Yamato) to develop a watch that met all their needs. The young engineer Ikuo Tokunaga, freshly graduated from the prestigious Waseda University in 1970, worked on the project, but the paternity of the watch, its design and all the work done in collaboration with the Japan Marine Industry teams from 1968 onwards belong to Taro Tanaka.

In 1975, the legendary 6159-7010 Grandfather Tuna was released, considered to be the world's finest diver's watch. For this watch, Tanaka worked with Nemoto Special Chemical, a Japanese company specializing in luminous paints since 1941, to develop a luminous material. Instead of tritium and other radioactive luminous materials then commonly used in watchmaking, his aim was to create a non-radioactive luminous paint for the Hiroshima divers. This exclusive paint for the Grandfather Tuna, called “NW Luminous”, was the world's first non-radioactive white luminous paint, a real innovation in watchmaking history, and the forerunner of Seiko's famous Lumi Brite. In 1993, Nemoto sold the “Luminova” license to the Swiss, while Lumi Brite remained a separate product, patented by Seiko.

But although this watch featured an impressive number of innovations, patents and world firsts, it was replaced 3 years later, in 1978, by an even more advanced version, this time equipped with a quartz movement: the no less legendary 7549-7000 Golden Tuna.

This next step in the global history of diving watches (the world's first quartz diver) will also be the very last watch designed by Taro Tanaka. Indeed, when Shoji Hattori died on July 29, 1974, a promising young Seiko executive decided there was no need for a design office, and it was dissolved in 1974, leaving Daini and Suwa in charge of all watch design matters, without an authority to oversee this heavy task and issue directives, as Taro Tanaka had done since 1959.

Ironically enough, when Suwa intended to release the Golden Tuna after the dissolution of the design studio, no designer was in a position to design such a watch, so they had to call on Taro Tanaka as product manager.

I don't know about you, but for me the Golden Tuna just took on a whole new dimension!

So you must be wondering what became of Taro Tanaka after the dissolution of the design studio of K Hattori (future Seiko Watch Corp).

Well, once again, he remained under the guidance of his lifelong mentor, Ren Tanaka, who established K Hattori's Customer Service Department in February 1976. Taro Tanaka was its manager, as well as responsible for catalog production, until the end of his career.

Years later, Seiko Watch Corp. re-created its design studio in Tokyo, realizing the serious mistake made in 1974, but this time without Taro Tanaka, who had already retired. Until recently, the studio was run by the talented Nobuhiro Kosugi, now retired.

Taro Tanaka's career as a designer only lasted about fifteen years, but he brought Seiko into the modern era and was a decisive player in the race Seiko won against Switzerland. He put his talent at the service of a global policy launched by Shoji Hattori, son of Kintaro Hattori, and gave a face to Seiko, creating popular watches like the Five, luxurious watches like the Grand Seiko, divers like the 6105 or the 6159 300m, sports watches like the 64 and 72 Olympic stopwatches, and special watches like the Tuna 600m, for which he was the mastermind of what would become the Lumi Brite and the Swiss Luminova.

In addition to the watches themselves, he developed the xxxx-xxxx format reference system that is still in use today, and also helped Seiko to structure itself internally with catalogs, at a time when Seiko kept almost no track of the inventory and sales results of each of its references.

In my opinion, Taro Tanaka remains one of the greatest names in the history of Seiko and watchmaking in general, and I hope this summary has helped you better appreciate the monumental impact he has had beyond Grand Seiko.