Remarkably, Citizen’s origin story combines elements of Seiko’s and Casio’s, though it is younger than one and older than the other. As the Shokosha Watch Research Institute, Citizen took its first steps in the industry in the 1920s through producing a pocket watch, which, as mentioned above, were still in vogue at the time – though not for long. Lacking a name for the watch, the company turned to Tokyo Mayor Count Shinpei Goto for inspiration, and he came back with the name “Citizen”, derived from his hope that the everyman — citizens — would use and cherish the watch for a long time to come.

When the Shokosha Watch Institute became the Citizen Watch Company in 1930 with the backing of both domestic and Swiss investors, the brand adopted the name of that first watch, carrying forward the hope that first pocket watch bore. Like Casio, Citizen also manufactured calculators and other electronic devices, even partnering with Compaq to manufacture notebook computers later in its history. 

That said, the Citizen brand is now more synonymous with watchmaking than electronics. While most of the watches launched between the 1930s to the 1980s were reliable, good looking timepieces, Citizen was not particularly heralded for any sort of horological cleverness. As we reported in our titanium special in 2021, this is misleading because the firm was responsible for the first Japanese water-resistant wristwatches in 1957 and the first overall to be cased in titanium. That latter first was the Citizen X8 Titanium Chronometer of 1970, which we thought you must have remembered, dear readers, because it celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2020.

In any case, what most of the world remembers and acknowledges is that Citizen came up with a groundbreaking horological innovation in 1993. That year, Citizen launched the world’s first multi-band atomic timekeeping watch — synchronisation with atomic clocks via radio waves promised incredible accuracy: to within one second every 100,000 years, and possibly even better. Breaking this new ground gave Citizen the momentum they needed to continue pushing boundaries in ultra-precise timekeeping. 

Following further development of its pioneering multi-band timekeeping technology, the Citizen-owned Miyota firm introduced a new movement, the Precisionist, one of the few and foremost examples of a high-precision quartz movement. With an oscillator that vibrates at 262,144 times per second — eight times as fast as a standard quartz crystal — the movement boasts a precision of +/- 10 seconds a year.

While it is exclusively available only in Bulova (also Citizen-owned) watches, the fact that such elite movements are found in such compact (the 2024 Super Seville measures in at 38mm), and aesthetically beautiful (the continuously sweeping second hand is a nice touch) packaging, makes Citizen (Miyota and Bulova as well) all the more the peoples’ champions, considering how they have democratised such incredible performance. 

Citizen’s horological innovation also manifested itself in the form of Eco-Drive technology, where a battery-powered movement was charged by solar cells small enough to fit underneath the dial of the watch. This enabled the creation of yet another high-precision quartz movement, in this case the Citizen A060 — a movement that (unofficially) holds the title of the most accurate quartz crystal watch ever made, with a precision of +/- 5 seconds a year.

Incorporated into references such as the Chronomaster AQ4041-54A, this union of ultra-precise timekeeping with a solar power source translates to a class-topping movement — considering the additional perpetual calendar functionality and titanium case, the timepiece is the embodiment of everything that Citizen and Japanese watchmaking in general stands for: great, lasting performance driven by horological innovation, at an accessible price point. 

This story was first seen as part of the WOW Legacy 2025 Issue

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