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Kintaro Hattori began a clock shop apprenticeship in Tokyo at 13 in the 1870s, working at the Kobayashi, Kameda and Sakata shops. In 1881, at 21, he opened K. Hattori, and in 1885 he bypassed domestic wholesalers to buy directly from foreign trading firms in the Yokohama settlement, gaining imported watches and machinery few rivals could get. After moving to Ginza, he became director of the Tokyo Clockmaker and Watchmaker Association at 31 and in 1892 began making clocks as Seikosha, the House of Exquisite Workmanship. A 16-meter clock tower and the Timekeeper pocket watch followed in 1895, and the Laurel, Japan’s first wristwatch, in 1913. In 1924 the company dropped the planned brand Glory because it sounded like gorori, a word for tumbling, and chose Seiko, a homophone for exquisite and for success.

Japanese government railways adopted Seiko pocket watches in 1929, and Seiko House Ginza was completed in 1932. After World War II, watchmaking was split between two rival factories, Daini Seikosha and Suwa Seikosha, which competed to out-engineer each other. Seiko entered the observatory chronometer competitions in Neuchâtel and Geneva and took first place overall in Geneva in 1968. On Christmas Day 1969 it released the Astron, the first commercially available quartz wristwatch, its crystal vibrating 32,768 times a second, setting off what Swiss watchmakers call the quartz crisis. The same year it launched an automatic chronograph with a vertical clutch.

• The Astron was priced like a midsize car when it launched.
• The vertical clutch starts the stopwatch by dropping one friction plate onto another, avoiding the jumping seconds hand of side-meshing gears.
• Seiko and Rolex are described as the only fully vertically integrated watchmakers; Seiko grows its own quartz crystals and smelts its own mainspring alloys.
• Spring Drive, introduced in 1999, uses a mainspring to spin a glide wheel that powers a quartz circuit, which brakes the wheel electromagnetically to eight revolutions per second.
• The Spring Drive caliber 9RB2 set a record of plus or minus 20 seconds a year, and Seiko times the World Athletics Championships.