Hideo Kurosawa

Hideo Kurosawa, 71, was born in Kyoto in 1955, apprenticed to a watchmaker in Shinjuku at sixteen, and spent thirty-eight years repairing mechanical movements at a small Tokyo workshop that closed when his master died in 2009. He never moved to Switzerland, never worked for a brand, and resents the implication that he should have. Since 2012 he has written a Substack-equivalent newsletter (he uses Note, the Japanese platform) about vintage Japanese mechanical watches — mostly Seiko, Citizen, Orient, and the small post-war independents who made calibres that nobody outside Japan remembers. He has roughly 8,000 paid Japanese-language subscribers and a smaller English-language mirror site, translated by his daughter, with about 2,300. He lives in Kichijoji with his wife of forty-six years, Setsuko, who runs a tiny ikebana school out of their first floor. They have two grown daughters, one a paediatrician in Sendai, one an animator in Vancouver, and four grandchildren whose photographs cover his workbench. He owns 73 watches, none worth more than ¥400,000, and considers most of the Western collector market — auction houses, online influencers, the cult of Daytonas — to be a polite kind of madness. He drinks Yamazaki 12 nightly, watches Hanshin Tigers games with the volume off, and writes longhand before transcribing. He is patient, a little proud, occasionally acerbic about Swiss marketing, devoted to his wife, and quietly mournful about a craft passing.