The main rivalry between the two Japanese giants in the horological world is their price tag which they managed t keep lower than the most high end watches that have the same features and accessories. Depending on what era you were trapped in, you could use a watch for everything from wowing the locals, to seeing exactly what time you were being devoured by something with big sharp teeth and an appetite to match – but what you wouldn’t want was something that would die on you in a couple of years. The Two Watch Collection, and we can’t think of a better way to start than pairing the Seiko 5 with another truly iconic and historically important timepiece: the inimitable, unbeatable, and virtually indestructible Casio G-Shock.
Let’s talk about the Seiko 5 first. It’s easy, with all the interest Seiko has generated in the last few years, in the higher end Prospex models (to name just two) to start to feel like the Seiko 5 is like an ocean-crossing luxury liner in the Roaring Twenties . People come to the Seiko 5 for different reasons – desire for reliability, or for a weekend beater, or simply for the pleasure of owning a mechanical watch with a great story behind it. Not everyone who gets a Seiko 5 does so because they need, on the whole, to save money rather than spend it, but there’s no denying that its cheapness and utility has done a lot to make the 5 possibly the single most widely owned and produced automatic watch in existence.
The Casio G-Shock is at least as well known, and almost certainly more widely worn, than the Seiko 5. Just as the Seiko 5 is defined by five basic attributes – the number 10 defined durability, recessed crown, day and date in a single window, water resistant, and self-winding, the very first G-Shock of 1983. The three basic goals that Casio
inventor Kikuo Ibe set for himself, and the watch, were that it should have a 10-year battery life, be water resistant to 10 bar/atmospheres, and most critically, it should be able to survive a 10 meter drop onto a concrete floor. The sheer number of life changing events, whether tragic, heroic, or sublime, that the G-Shock has witnessed certainly exceeds those witnessed by any other watch. They have been everywhere from high mountains to deep oceans to supersonic flight, to outer space, and they require an interesting amount of applied force and determination to destroy. In addition to the shock resistance conferred by the “container within a container” structure of the G-Shock, they seem to be able to put up with other, more exotic forms of punishment as well. I put mine (shown in this story) on top of a neodymium magnet with a 4000+ gauss surface strength, with no effect at all. Casio does mention that its G-Shocks are designed to resist magnetism, but this is a level of immunity to anything you are ever likely to encounter in a real world situation that I was not expecting.
The G-Shock and the Seiko 5: two watches that, irrespective of price, are such classics of wristwatch engineering and design that they more than earn their place as our first pair of timepieces in The Two Watch Collection.
