Seiko — Ideas

When growing up I wore watches so I could arrive at school in time but with the onset of smartphones I abandoned watches altogether. Until recently, when I bought a Seiko solar diver SNE573P1 from the Prospex series. I owned this watch for about a year when I thought it would be cool to wear an automatic watch. Practically everything is battery operated and the thought of a piece of precision engineering, which works without a battery, appealed to me.

It is not easy to pick a watch from the thousands of options. I choose to limit myself to Seiko because they are affordable to me. I can forget about a Rolex Explorer, Submariner or a gold-cased Gruen Precision 510, besides, my name is not Bond. Since I love mountain walking the Alpinist sub brand of Seiko caught my eye. Seiko had just released a reimagined Alpinist from the early 1960s.

The original Alpinist was made for Yama-otoko, mountain men. With post-war disposable income weekend mountain hiking trips became a possibility in Japan. It even seems to have been the theme of the 1962 movie 山男の歌. (Song of Mountain Men). But the longer I looked at the modern interpretation of the very original Alpinist, the more differences I noticed. I was looking for a different heritage watch.

Seiko didn’t use the Alpinist brand for three decades until 1995 when Seiko introduced a very different Alpinist: the “Red Alpinist”. This watch had an internal compass bezel and a second crown to operate the compass. It allows you to find north when pointing the hour hand in the direction of the sun. It came in different dial colours but the black dial on a metal bracelet appealed to me for its 1990s look. The black dial reappeared in 2003 on the Alpinist 8F56, in 2006 on the SARB15 and in 2020 on the latest version, the Seiko SBDC087.

Advertisement for the Seiko Alpinist 8F56 from 2003.

Seiko Prospex SBDC087

The 2020 Seiko SBDC087 (Outside Japan: SPB117J1) looks very similar to the 1995 Alpinist 4S15-6000. It has the same Cathedral hands, internal compass bezel, date cyclops and shark teeth hour markers, alas not applied with lume. The Alpinist branding is gone, but it is hard not to see the SBDC087 as an Alpinist. It feels like a heritage watch to me, a 1990s heritage watch. I consider the dial both understated and interesting to look at. I don’t think I will ever get lost in the woods to a point I need the built in navigation tool. The watch is not a diver but still has a 20 bar water resistance, which is over-engineerd for a watch like this. I bought my watch directly from Japan under the Japanese product name SBDC087 for ¥ 70 818.

Seiko Prospex SBDC109 (outside Japan SPB151)

After spending only a month with my “Alpinist” I realised I wanted to replace the solar Seiko with an automatic diver. This choice was even harder because Seiko makes so many divers. I almost went for a recently discontinued SKX013 when I read about the “Captain Willard”. I had disregarded this watch because of its size, but the 46,6 mm lug to lug length was not so different from the 45.9 mm lug to lug Alpinist.

The Captain Willard is another heritage watch, which takes almost all of its design from the Seiko 6105-8110 which was produced between 1970 and 1977. Back then it was a reliable but cheap watch. The 6105 was popular among US soldiers in the Viet Nam War and was available in the U.S. military PX’s (Post Exchanges) on bases in Southeast Asia. It could withstand the rigours of the humid jungle.

The watch got its nickname because Martin Sheen, as U.S. Army Captain Benjamin Willard, wore a Seiko 6105 in the 1979 movie Apocalypse Now. I planned to replace the metal bracelet with a rubber Tropic strap.