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Seiko and Citizen are the two undisputed titans among Japanese watch brands, known and admired worldwide for their technical excellence, design acumen, and legendary price-to-value ratio, not to mention the role that both brands have played in the technological and cultural evolution of watchmaking in general. And while these world-renowned companies have been fierce competitors from the beginning, they have a lot in common as well. Here we present a side-by-side comparison of Seiko vs Citizen, starting with their earliest days and concluding with an overview of what each brand is doing today.
With its very high-tech lineup and avant-garde designs, one might be inclined to think Citizen Watch Company is a relatively new player on the worldwide watch scene, but one would be mistaken. The company today known as Citizen was founded in 1918 by Kamakechi Yamazaki as the Shokosha Watch Research Institute. The name “Citizen” first appeared on the dial of a pocket watch that Shokosha produced in 1924; it is believed to have been suggested by Yamazaki’s close friend Shinpei Goto, then the mayor of Tokyo, who believed such a watch should be universally appealing and accessible to all “citizens” of Japan.
Shokosha merged with the Schmid company, a Japan-based manufacturing firm founded by expatriate Swiss watchmaker Rodolphe Schmid, in 1930 to become Citizen. Joining the expertise of Shokosha’s Japanese watchmakers with the manufacturing capacity of Schmid’s facilities proved to be a successful marriage: the company grew in the ensuing decades, finishing its first wristwatch just one year after the merger, in 1931, and began producing machine tools in its own factory in 1941. In 1952, Citizen marketed the first Japanese-made watch with a calendar function, and the company started exporting its products outside of Japan in 1955.
By the 1970s, Citizen’s watchmaking assembly line was fully automated; it was one of the first companies to accomplish this feat. At the same time, the company was fully engaged in the pursuit of new technologies in watchmaking, ones that would make watches more inexpensive to produce while also making them more accurate. Citizen’s main Japanese competitor was already a few steps ahead in that quest.
Seiko, the world’s oldest Japanese watchmaking firm, traces its origins to 1881, the year 21-year-old entrepreneur Kintaro Hattori opened the K. Hattori watch and clock shop in Tokyo’s Kyobashi district for the assembly and repair of pocket watches and clocks. Hattori was 31 when he and his partner Tsuruhiko Yoshikawa set up the Seikosha watch factory, the forerunner of today’s Seiko, in 1892. The word "Seiko" is derived from the Japanese word "Seikosha," which translates as "House of Exquisite Workmanship." During his tenure, until his death in 1934, Hattori was responsible for several watch-industry milestones.
Photo: HSNY
The first-ever “Seikosha” watch was the simply named Timekeeper pocket watch, released in 1895, which featured a Swiss-made movement inside a 54mm case made of silver. The fact that it was sold in Japan but had the English-language name “Timekeeper” was a testament to the business savvy of Hattori, who foresaw the possibilities of exporting his timepieces to the international market. Shortly thereafter, shrewdly anticipating the rise of the wristwatch to dominance in the international marketplace, Hattori created the first Japanese-made wristwatch, the Laurel (above). Released in 1913, the Laurel, which was in actuality a re-engineered version of an earlier pocketwatch with the same name, also had a silver case (albeit much smaller, at 29.6mm) and an enamel dial, but was also notable for having a movement with parts made in Japan.
The name “Seiko” finally appeared on a watch dial in 1924, just one year after the great Kanto Earthquake that struck Japan and nearly destroyed Hattori’s factory, forcing him to resolutely rebuild. (Yes, the first "official" Seiko and Citizen watches were born in the exact same year.) The 24.2mm watch with a nickel case and a small seconds subdial set the standard for Japanese watch design for decades to come; the first Japanese watch with central seconds wouldn’t arrive until 1950 (also from Seiko). By the end of the 1950s, Seiko watches were reaching the shores of the United States, and the stage was set for the many milestones the company would achieve in the ensuing decades.
Both Seiko and Citizen can lay claim to game-changing technological developments in watchmaking in the 20th and 21st Centuries. Appropriately for companies based in Japan, a nation renowned for its cultural devotion to cutting-edge electronics, much of these innovations took the traditional, mechanical art of watchmaking to new, high-tech heights.
The watch industry was entering an era of fundamental change in the late 1960s and Seiko was destined to play a leading role. By far the most disruptive and transformational invention to affect the watch industry in that tumultuous era was the first quartz movement in a wristwatch: Seiko’s Caliber 35A, which made its debut inside a watch called the Quartz Astron (below) in 1969.
Unlike mechanical movements, which store their energy in a wound mainspring inside a barrel and releases it through a complex series of gears to move the hands, quartz movements derive their power from a small electrical charge from a battery, which then passes through an integrated circuit that applies the charge to a tiny quartz crystal shaped like a tuning fork. The incredibly high rate of that crystal’s vibration dwarfs that of a mechanical movement (32,768 times per second, as opposed to the 3 or 4 times per second of most mechanical oscillators), and drives the second hand only once per second with the aid of a tiny motor, a development that had never before been seen in watches, conserving energy and ensuring an accuracy of just -/+ 5 seconds per month. The original Astron was a short-lived product, but it spurred Seiko — and eventually many other watchmakers inside and outside of Japan, including Citizen — to adopt quartz as their go-to movement option for years to come, to the point where traditional mechanical watchmaking, as practiced by the Swiss and others, threatened to fall by the wayside entirely.
Seiko’s other signature technical development, one that is still exclusive to the brand, is Spring Drive, which Seiko engineers began working on as early as 1977 and which finally made its way to a commercial product (below) in 1999. The Spring Drive movement combines the high torque of a traditional mechanical watch movement with the high precision of a quartz one — in other words, a mainspring-powered watch that can achieve the accuracy of a battery-powered one. It accomplishes this chiefly through the use of three in-house inventions. The first is the Spron 510 mainspring, made of a proprietary high-elasticity material engineered to deliver more power, more smoothly, and for a more extended period, to the regulator.
The second is the so-called Magic Lever, which is affixed directly to the shaft of the rotor for a more efficient winding motion. Finally, there is the Tri-Synchro regulator, which replaces the escapement and regulates the three types of energy generated by the movement — the mainspring’s mechanical energy, the quartz crystal oscillator’s electrical energy, and the resulting electromagnetic energy that turns the glide wheel. The latter component replaces a traditional balance wheel and rotates uniformly over an electromagnetic coil. Spring Drive remains a staple of watches from Seiko, and its more luxurious sibling, Grand Seiko, to this day.
Citizen started installing quartz movements in its watches around 1973, just a few years after its competitor had brought them to the market. However, Citizen was determined from the start to make such movements even more efficient and user-friendly with a proprietary technology of its own.
The origin of Eco-Drive, Citizen’s most famous and impactful technical contribution to watch history, begins in 1976. That was the year the company introduced the Quartz Crystron Solar Cell, the first watch with a quartz movement whose rechargeable battery could be powered by any light source, from natural sunlight to a lamp on a nightstand. The battery life of the analog-digital Crystron was very low, so Citizen continued upgrading the light-charging technology, releasing a watch in 1986 that could run on a single charge of light for eight days and another in 1995 that ran for six months on a single charge. It took another decade for Citizen’s determined engineers to mold these early efforts into the Eco-Drive system as we now know it.
The first Citizen Eco-Drive watches, powered by the Caliber 7878, were launched in 1996, equipped with the groundbreaking technology that is still at the heart of the Eco-Drive movements today: light passes through a translucent dial with a solar cell mounted directly underneath it, which supplies power to the lithium ion battery of the movement below. From an environmental standpoint, this also means the wearer almost never needs to discard old batteries and replace them with new ones. Eco-Drive has become the tentpole technology around which Citizen has built much of its modern collection, and Citizen continues to improve upon its Eco-Drive calibers in the 21st Century.
Tuna and Fugu, Turtle and EcoZilla — over the course of their parallel histories, both Seiko and Citizen have made their mark on the wildly popular dive watch genre, inspiring some truly memorable and descriptive nicknames for them along the way.
Recreational diving entered the mainstream as a popular hobby in the 1950s, and watch brands jumped at the chance to cater to this new demographic with purpose-built watches for underwater activities, starting with the category’s foundational pieces, the Rolex Submariner and Blancpain Fifty Fathoms — both in 1953, both from Switzerland. Japan’s watchmakers took more than a decade to respond, starting with Seiko, which introduced the first Japanese-made divers’ watch, the Seiko Diver’s 150M, in 1965.
The watch’s stainless steel case, measuring 38mm in diameter, was water-resistant to (of course) 150 meters, and had a bidirectional rotating bezel to set dive times; the safer and more utilitarian unidirectional design, pioneered by Blancpain on the Fifty Fathoms, had yet to become common. Inside the case was Seiko’s automatic Caliber 6217, beating at 18,000 vph. In 1968, Seiko upgraded both the movement (with a 36,000-vph “high-beat” caliber) and the water resistance (to 300 meters).
Seiko claimed another first in 1975 with its Professional Diver's watch, which was not only water-resistant to an almost-unheard-of 600 meters, but was also the first dive watch with a titanium case — despite the fact that its competitor Citizen had been the first to make a titanium watch case five years earlier. The Professional Diver's watch finally got a unidirectionally rotating dive-scale bezel in 1986, along with an even more extreme 1,000-meter depth rating. It’s worth noting that the in-house standards that Seiko adopted for its dive watches helped establish the ISO standards for dive watches that are still in use across the industry today. The 1975 model is even more famous for establishing the “Tuna Can” case structure that would define many Seiko dive watches that followed.
On the heels of the Tuna came the Seiko Turtle. The first Seiko dive watches nicknamed “Turtle” surfaced in 1976; they were notable for their cushion-shaped cases with softly rounded lugs, which brought to mind the silhouette of a turtle when viewed from above. The Seiko Turtle gained a modicum of pop-culture visibility when actor Ed Harris wore one in the 1989 underwater-adventure film The Abyss, and also when it was spotted on the wrists of legendary rockers Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones and Brian May of Queen. The original Turtle references were made for a relatively short period, from 1976 to 1988, with 44mm steel cases, Hardlex mineral crystals, matte black dials with big, luminous elements, bidirectional rotating bezels with easy-grip fluting, and an in-house automatic movements. The Turtle and its bigger brother, the 45mm “King Turtle” have recently been resurrected as part of Seiko’s contemporary Prospex series.
While Seiko is widely acknowledged as the maker of Japan’s first divers’ watch, it is Citizen that gave the world the first “water-resistant” Japanese watch, the Parawater. Preceding the Seiko Diver’s 150M to market by six years, in 1959, the Parawater was waterproof to 50 meters of depth, an impressive feat for the era, and proved to be the forerunners of Citizen’s contemporary line of dive watches, which kicked off in earnest with the Promaster Marine in 1982. That same year, Citizen released its 1300M Professional Diver’s Watch, its first in a titanium case, which went into the record books as the most water-resistant watch in serial production at the time.
Citizen continued to innovate in the dive-watch space throughout the 1980s. The first Citizen Aqualand debuted in 1985 as the first quartz diving watch with a digital depth gauge. Building upon that legacy, Citizen introduced the original “Fugu” dive watch in 1989, whose large bezel with alternating smooth and serrated edges made the watch’s case resemble the puffer fish that gave it its nickname (and later its actual model name). The launch of the Fugu marked the modern era of the Promaster family within the Citizen portfolio, which today consists of watches aimed at land, sea, and air professionals.
Citizen has been even less shy than Seiko about embracing massive case sizes and wildly unconventional designs in its dive watches over the years. The rugged, landmine-shaped, 46mm case of the Promaster Dive “Retro-Zilla” is a modern take on the chunky case of Citizen’s first dive watch from 1982, the Professional 1300M Diver. It is constructed from Citizen’s ultra-hard “Super Titanium,” with a scratch-resistant Duratect DLC coating, and includes a lockable, one-way rotating dive-scale bezel and a knurled, screwed crown at 3 o’clock.
The “Orca” model’s bulging steel case (also 46mm), with deep notches in its unidirectional bezel, calls to mind the eponymous killer whale from which it derives its nickname, with the black dial’s fat, white, curving indexes driving home the theme (below). Pushing the boundaries of both wrist wearability and water resistance is the “Eco-Zilla” model, measuring a stately 48mm in diameter and shaped something like a big tabletop ashtray, offering a 300-meter depth rating and an Eco-Drive movement.
Both Citizen and Seiko continue to diversify their product selections as well as introduce new technological advancements to watchmaking. Each brand offers watches with impressive variations on radio-controlled atomic timekeeping.
If the original Astron represented a quantum leap in horological high technology in 1969, the revival of the model in 2012 was another statement piece from Seiko, as the first analog wristwatch equipped with a solar-powered movement capable of receiving signals from GPS (global positioning system) satellites and instantly adjusting to any time zone on Earth. From a technology perspective, this combination of features set the new-generation Astron apart from other light-powered timepieces (like those powered by Citizen’s Eco-Drive calibers) and also from so-called “Radio-Controlled” watches, which receive time signals only when in range of terrestrial atomic clocks.
With the push of a button on the case, the Astron’s wearer can change the local time by synching the watch’s built-in antenna with GPS signals, and adjust for Daylight Saving Time with another button push. The time transmitted by these signals is incredibly accurate and reliable — losing one second approximately every 100,000 years — and the movement can be charged constantly, no battery changes required, as long as it was regularly exposed to sunlight — or any light, really. This 21st-Century version of the Astron is obviously something far beyond just quartz, and today it occupies an important place among Seiko’s marquee product families.
Citizen had been working on radio-controlled wristwatches since 1993, and succeeded in merging the multi-band time receiver with its signature Eco-Drive system ten years later. The first Eco-Drive Radio Controlled watch, with its tiny antenna tucked out of sight behind the light-absorbing dial, begat 2013’s Satellite Wave-Air GPS watch, the first wristwatch able to receive signals from GPS satellites to automatically adjust the time. And in 2023, the 30th anniversary of this quest, Citizen poured all these elements into the Tsuki-yomi A-T, the first light-powered watch with a fully analog moon-phase display, and the first moon-phase that requires no manual adjustments whatsoever from the wearer.
Its high-tech movement, Eco-Drive Caliber H874, receives signals from six multi-band radio transmitters via special AT-cut-type crystal oscillators, which vibrate at a frequency of 8.4 MHz, in place of the tuning fork-shaped oscillators used in most quartz movements. The former’s frequency is 250 times higher than the latter’s, enabling the movement to operate up to six months on a single light charge. Beyond the high-tech lunar display, the Tsuki-yomi A-T (its name derived from a moon god in Japanese mythology) is designed for both comfort and visual appeal, with a lightweight “Super Titanium” case and a moon-surface pattern on the translucent dial.
Aside from their fascinating histories, and the array of technological milestones from both Japanese brands, Seiko and Citizen both offer a diverse lineup of watches today, from tool watch styles inspired by diving and aviation, to rugged field watches and everyday-wear styles, to dress watches that offer wearable luxury at price points that are nearly always reasonable. We’ve just scratched the surface so far, and the portfolios of both brands are far too large to cover fully here, but here is some insight for enthusiasts looking to discover the most popular Citizen and Seiko collections.
Seiko’s Prospex family of watches encompasses a wide range of tool-oriented models, many of which are crowd-pleasing revivals of classic dive watches like the Marinemaster 1965 Diver and the original “Turtle;” the famed analog-digital “Arnie” (above), made famous by Arnold Schwarzenegger in several ‘80s blockbusters; and the GMT-equipped Marinemaster 1968 Heritage Divers. The collection also includes pilot-style watches both high-tech and classical, motorsport-inspired chronographs in the Speedtimer subfamily, which take their cues from a 1969 model and feature proprietary solar-powered movements, and the mountaineering-influenced Alpinist field watches that have found a receptive audience since their recent revival. Prospex watches contain the full gamut of Seiko’s in-house movement types, from automatic mechanical to quartz to Spring Drive to Solar.
Citizen’s Promaster series, established in 1982, also consists of robust and stylish tool watches, all built around a “land, sea, and air” theme. This sprawling collection includes many of the brand’s dive watches, including the models mentioned above, as well as the analog-digital Aqualand models; as well as some of the industry’s most complex, high-tech pilots’ watches. The latter category includes the Promaster Navihawk, with its multifunction dial designed to resemble an aircraft cockpit HUD display, and the slide-rule-equipped Nighthawk (above), with design and technical elements drawn from military helicopters. These multifunctional aviator-style watches use Eco-Drive movements, while the dive watches use either Eco-Drive or Citizen’s own automatic Miyota movements.
On the dressier side of Seiko’s vast portfolio are the Presage models, which debuted relatively recently, in 2016, though the Presage name had been around since 1960. Presage watches, from the beginning of this new era, were to stand apart from other Seiko sub-families like Prospex in that they would exclusively carry in-house mechanical movements — not quartz or Spring Drive, though the latter has since found its way into some Presage models. Here is where you will find elegant styling, decorative elements like enamel dials, and intricate textural motifs. By far the most widely embraced Presage models are the so-called “Cocktail Time” pieces, which take inspiration from Tokyo’s famous cocktail bars and whose dials evoke the enticing colors of drinks like the Martini, Manhattan, and Margarita.
Even newer to the market is Citizen’s Series 8 collection, which is the brand’s first major product family to use entirely mechanical movements rather than Eco-Drive or other quartz options. Series 8 watches also strive for a “sport-luxury” aesthetic with their integrated bracelets, sturdy yet stylish build, and elegantly executed dial textures. The “8” represents the symbol for Infinity, hinting at the collection’s “infinite” possibilities. The family has two branches, the round-cased 870 and the sportier 831, the latter recognizable for its octagonal case. In 2025, the Series 8 Mechanical Limited Edition, with an ice-blue, geometrically textured dial and exhibition caseback displaying the automatic Caliber 9051, seemed to point the way to new and even more colorful iterations in the series.
The Seiko 5 watch series traces its roots all the way back to 1963 and the original Seiko Sportsmatic 5, a groundbreaking timepiece that ushered in the emblematic “five attributes” that define the vast collection today. These include automatic movements, day/date displays in a single window, water resistance, a recessed crown at 4 o’clock, and a case and bracelet made of durable materials. Stylistically, the watches run the gamut from dress pieces to field watches to divers, with all kinds of variations in between (the current shorthand descriptions are Sense, Specialist, Sports, Suits, and Street). Seiko 5 watches still adhere to those five principles initially laid out more than half a century ago while still retaining the famously inexpensive price points that have made them so desirable — from under $100 to the neighborhood of $500 for the more exclusive editions.
Joining Citizen’s lineup of mechanical timepieces in Spring 2023 is the NJ015 automatic series, nicknamed “Tsuyosa,” a Japanese word meaning “strength.” Speaking to the contemporary trend towards eye-catching colorful dials, the Tsuyosa models offer numerous options, all with a subtle sunburst finish: blue, yellow, green, turquoise, and black. The round, chamfered steel cases measure either 40mm or 37mm in diameter and feature a combination of brushed and polished surfaces along with an unconventionally positioned crown at 4 o’clock for better ergonomics on the wrist. The smaller models have the added bonus of a “cyclops” magnifying lens over the date at 3 o’clock. The bracelet has what Citizen describes as a “mountain-shaped” design thanks to its individually curved links; the center links and the bezel are both sleekly polished. The self-winding movement inside is Citizen’s own Caliber 8210.
You can learn more about the brands at citzenwatch.com and seikowatches.com
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1 Comment
Fantastic write up, glad I have a couple of both.