If you love Grand Seiko I understand. Some people love the design language and for those who do, the dials are often enough on their own. That's the beauty of this hobby, we all like different things. If we didn't there would be queues of people in the street lining up for plastic watches with disposable movements and waiting lists for quite ordinary Swiss made tool watches, oh, wait.

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So why do I own a Grand Seiko then? I pondered this one for quite a while whilst writing this and came to a conclusion which suprised me. The two main reasons are hype, and vanity.

For years in my collection I had a Seiko SJW041. I bought it for not much, second hand from eBay. It had 100m water resistance and sapphire crystal. It'd always been my grab and go watch. Something happens, some crisis, and you find yourself rushing out of the house grabbing a quartz watch because you know it'll be telling the correct time.

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After years of watching YouTube videos of influencers singing the praises of Grand Seiko, I thought, let's find an affordable quartz Grand Seiko so that my grab and go quartz watch is something more interesting than the eBay Seiko. So it was, that hype set me on the path.

The watch I found is a vintage Grand Seiko SBGS009. It's one of the first watches Grand Seiko released after they were relaunched in 1988.

 

It uses a 95GS movement, the first ever Grand Seiko quartz movement which evolved into the much loved 9F, arguably the best quartz movement ever produced. It's accurate to within ten seconds per year. You read that right, not per month, per year.

 

Seiko actually grew the quartz crystals themselves, because synthetic quartz is more accurate and unlike most quartz movements it's designed to be serviced, rather than replaced and disposed of.

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It has an unmarked sapphire crystal with the most subtle of domes, but the zaratsu polished 33mm case has collected many scratches over the last four decades. The tiny push pull crown is beautifully signed and the caseback is expertly engraved with the GS logo.

 

The 18mm lug width makes playing with straps easy, although the lugs aren't drilled, I've enjoyed putting it on some very brightly coloured suede straps this summer and in doing so have discovered that this quite classical, rather serious watch can easily be turned into something very versatile and fun.

 

The indices and brand logos are applied and polished to perfection, being a vintage dress watch there is no lume to speak of. The dial is absolutely stunning in person, finished with a fine champagne sunburst. It's almost impossible to capture how the dial reflects light in photographs.

So influencer hype led me to want to sample Grand Seiko, and this vintage model was appealing to me because of its size, the fact that it doesn't conform to the Taro Tanakas angular design language and of course that incredibly impressive movement. Vanity is why I've kept it though. On paper it is far superior to the Seiko it replaced, but in practice it functions much the same. Worse in some ways owing to its lack of lume.

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Why would I keep a watch tens times more expensive than the Seiko which does essentially the exact same thing? Because somehow I've arrived at a point in my collecting where even in the middle of the night when I'm grabbing a quartz watch to rush to a crisis, I need it to be zaratsu polished and accurate to within ten seconds per year.

 

There is no rationalising that. The mirror finishing of the zaratsu polishing perfectly reflects the absurdity of my investment into this hobby. I'm ok with that.

 

Sometimes we learn about watches, sometimes we learn about ourselves. This watch has taught me I'm not as rational as I'd like to think.