Japan is taking on the Swiss with a little help from Studio Ghibli
Next year the sell-out stage adaptation of Hayao Mizyaki’s tale of two girls, a catbus and a forest spirit, My Neighbour Totoro, will transfer to the West End. This year Spirited Away, another Studio Ghibli classic about a girl, a bathhouse for gods, and a boy who turns into a dragon, was staged at the London Coliseum in Japanese with surtitles. On television recently we’ve been transported to feudal Japan in Shōgun and experienced the seedy underbelly of late-90s yakuza-run Tokyo in Tokyo Vice.
Trendy sorts who used to carry Daunt Books bags now have the distinctive blue covers of Fitzcarraldo editions of translated Japanese novels tucked under their arm. Where children of the 1980s and 90s, looked to the US for our cultural diet, young people today are far more likely to seek their inspiration from Japan. By the same token, whereas watch writers of my generaiton looked to Switzerland, eyes are now trained upon Japan.
Granted Japan’s presence in the UK market isn’t a new thing. Seiko has been available here since 1971, the G-Shock and Baby G craze engulfed the 1990s and for a time you couldn’t hit a hipster in Hackney that didn’t have a gold-plate digital Casio on their wrist.
But this feels different. Grand Seiko arriving on these shores in 2010 opened non-Japanophile watch collectors’ eyes to the idea that Japan wasn’t all affordable automatics and cheap quartz. These watches were, and still are, made in a similar way to the Swiss. However there’s an emphasis on nature, and on that typically Japanese quest for perfection that is ultimately unattainable: dō.
Its dial names, for instance, are taken from the landscape as seen from its Shizukuishi Watch Studio in the Iwate District as it passes through the 24 tekki, or seasons. It brings a spirituality to watchmaking that seems to have been somewhat lost in a Swiss industry that increasingly prioritises robotics and super-efficient production.
As a generation of twenty-somethings who fell in love with Studio Ghibli became of watch-buying age – and also of an age to show these films to their children – (I’m talking about myself here) brands such as Seiko leveraged that nostalgia with Ghibli limited editions. Cannily choosing deep-cut films such as Laputa: Castle in the Sky and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, it parlayed the IYKYK element of discovering Studio Ghibli at a time when you could be sniffy about watching them in dub, making these limited editions even more desirable.
Obscure manga characters have also started appearing on watches from Swiss brands, which means that Switzerland does at least have one eye on what is happening trend-wise.
What practical effect, if any, this will have on Switzerland is not yet evident but the mere fact that the chief exec of Tissot is parlaying a childhood love of manga into his brand’s watch design shows that even the Helvetians aren’t impervious to Japan’s cultural takeover.
• Laura is a leading watch and jewellery writer