Disclaimer Foreword
This post takes an esoteric, side-on view of a most esoteric and side-on watch. It introduces various Japanese cultural and artistic concepts. I should point out that my wife lived and worked in Japan for many years, and that my sister-in-law is half Japanese. Naturally, in developing the thoughts below I eschewed any discussion with them, instead reading a bunch of old seiko press booklets and a few poems....
There are two problems, and only two, with the Grand Seiko SBGX209. The first, it is only available in Japan. Not such a biggie. The second is its name.
‘SBGX209’ doesn’t trip off the toungue; it cannot be squealed in transports of delight, nor breathed in reverential sotto voce. It is merely functional – a catalogue note in a short-sleeved polyester shirt, an index, a reference. As a name, it cannot be held in the mind; it conjures nothing, it fails the watch. Because this is a watch that deserves a name.
The dial of the ’209, more expansive now than in its ’009 incarnation on which I have mused previously, remains the colour of bone. Specifically of bone aged and a little bleached from exposure to elements unknown, among the half-dead grass on the bank of a brook. There is little shine to it; it barely reflects the sky.
That description of the coluration may sound unduly precise, but it is drawn from the imagery of Chūya Nakahara in his poem ‘Bones,’ which not only sketches the colour of the watch but also offers a Japanese approach vector for the watch in the round, and the attributes that we in the West might otherwise simply call ‘numinous.’
Chūya Nakahara
The conceptual separation of the body and the spirit is particularly acute in Japan – at least, so we’re told by Lifton, Kato and Reich, who suggest that ongoing transformation and variance allows for an eternity of successive lives. The concept of the ‘bone’ ties the body and the spirit together. As Nakahara had it:
The spirit remains after death,
and comes back to the place of its bones.
Is the spirit who is seeing its bones?
Yes, ‘bone’ fits this watch. Not only for its dial colour but its protean melancholy and its perfection; its link between the spirit and the clay of the world.
Turned bone kiseru
So that’s that. But what else must a budding Japanomaniac consider when getting to grips with the glories of the bone watch? I’m afraid it’s shibui time.
Shibui is a concept that brings together the aesthetics of subtle, simple, and unshowy beauty. But not too simple: Shibusa requires ‘fine quality with economy of form, line, and effort, producing a timeless tranquility,’ and so it requires a tension and resolution between aesthetic positions. Stepped case lines? Polished surfaces and brushed? There is complexity here that reveals itself slowly.
Not reserved for formal arts, the concept of shiubi is quite generally applicable and can be bandied about (if one can find suitably subtle, simple, and unshowy specimens) on matters from watches to whiskey. There are seven elements of shibusa: simplicity, implicity, modesty, naturalness, everydayness, imperfection, and silence.
In case we’ve yet to smuggle enough aesthetic theory into a watch review, let’s pause for a moment to acknowledge these guys:
Sorry – onwards!
It’s time to see how the concepts of shibusa as developed by Dr. Sōetsu Yanagi stack up against this watch.
And no, that’s not him (it’s Kintaro Hattori, natch) Yanagi didn’t work for Grand Seiko’s design team, he was an aesthetician. But Nobuhiro Kosugi did work there (he was manager of the Seiko Watch design Centre when the SBGX209’s case shape was first seeded in the SBG001), and with this series of watches – and its apogee in the ’209 – Kosugi seems to have produced an example of shibusa in the applied arts that admits no equal.
Dr. Sōetsu Yanagi's principals as a checklist of design for the GS domestic market stepped-case watches:
1. The aristocratic simplicity of shibusa is the refined expression of the essence of elements in an aesthetic experience producing quietude. Spare elegance is evident in darkling serenity with a hint of sparkle.
2. Implicity allows depth of feeling to be visible through spare surface design thereby manifesting the invisible core that offers new meanings with each encounter.
3. A modesty that exalts excellence. It absorbs, understands, develops, and merges into understatement and silence concerning the thing itself.
4. Naturalness conveys spontaneity in unforced growth. Shibusa freedom is maintained in healthy roughness of texture and irregular asymmetrical form wherein the center lies beyond all particular things, in infinity.
5. Everydayness raises ordinary things to a place of honor, void of all artificial and unnecessary properties, thus imparting spiritual joy—for today is more auspicious than tomorrow. Everydayness provides a framework, a tradition for an artist's oeuvre to be a unit not a process.
6. Imperfection in shibusa terms, Yanagi casts imperfection as 'beauty with inner implications,' with the implication that a subjective level of beauty can be revealed to the individual. Here, perhaps, it would be the drilled-through lugs, which puncture the line of the watch, but also improve its practicality and everydayness.
7. Shibusa's sanctuary of silence is non-dualism—the resolution of opposites. Its foundation is intuition coupled with faith and beauty revealing phases of truth and the worship and reverence for life.
In the final analysis, this is still an SBGX009, just one with less on the dial. Many will prefer the earlier treatment, and there are certainly strong arguments in favour of each, even within the strictures of shibui. If you're looking for more technical information on these watches, I pondered the SBGX009 here (with a bit more fidelity to its watchness), and discussed the fine-tuning of the 9f module to within 1 second per year accuracy here. And for more context on High-Accuracy Quartz, there's Tokyo Tokei's fascinating tale of clepsydra, pendulums and quartz.