Summertime Blues: The Grand Seiko SBGJ249 GMT “Shōsho”

Are you stuck, in the immortal words of Eddy Cochrane, working all summer just to try and make a dollar? When you call your baby to try to get a date, does your boss say, “no dice son, you gotta work late”? Do you need something to put a smile on your face when your desktop is drowning in spreadsheets and all the other kids are out at the Hamptons (or Art Basel Miami, or wherever) getting all the surf, sun, leisure, and culture you’re not getting? Let me suggest, as at least a partial cure for your malaise, the Grand Seiko SBGJ249 Hi-Beat GMT “Shōsho” – just the thing for the hard-working salaryman (salary person) sucking stale AC air instead of honeysuckle-sweet summer breezes.

Watches For All Seasons

The SBGJ249 was originally released in February of 2021, as part of the Four Seasons collection (no connection to the hotels). The collection is a group of four watches, and each one of them is related to a particular season. In the traditional Japanese and Chinese calendars, there are many more seasons than the four recognized in the Gregorian calendar – there are 24 sekki, or smaller seasons, and each one of those is further broken down into three sets of five days, for a total of 72 micro-seasons in all.  Each of the sekki seasons corresponds to a particular change in climate important to an agrarian culture – spring, for instance, is broken down into six sekki, beginning with Risshun (start of spring; ground thaws) and ending with Kokū (rain for harvests, when rice seedlings sprout).

SBG249 is named for Shōsho, which begins July 7th and which means, “small heat” – the time of year when “warm winds blow, lotuses bloom, young hawks learn to fly.” It’s the official start of midsummer and the beginning of real summer warmth (it’s followed in the calendar, logically enough, by Taishō, or “big heat.”)

Grand Seiko has in recent years, made extensive use of natural phenomena in Japan for inspiration for dials, including other seasons (like the “Shunbun” from the same collection as SBG249, which is linked to the Vernal Equinox) as well as, maybe most famously, the appearance of a field of newly fallen snow, in the SBGA011 “Snowflake”). When you think of midsummer, you might thing of profuse growth of greenery, stands of pine trees whispering in the breeze, or deep shadows under forest foliage. The Shōsho dial is meant to contrast with the heat of the summer season by offering some visual coolness, with a blue wave texture evocative of a clear mountain lake at midday.

A History Of Hi-Beats

The movement is Grand Seiko’s in-house caliber 9S86, which was introduced in 2014 and which is a GMT version of caliber 9S85, introduced in 2009. It’s a high-frequency movement, beating at 36,000 vph (a modern automatic movement typically beats at around 28,800 vph) and the purpose of a high frequency movement is to offer better precision and better rate stability.

Grand Seiko has been making high frequency movements, on and off, for many years – the first was the 61GS, in 1968, and Grand Seiko would go on to used high frequency movements in the avidly collected VFA (very fine adjusted) Grand Seiko watches as well. When the 9S85 was launched in 2009, it had been 41 years since GS had introduced a new Hi-Beat caliber.

Grand Seiko is justly famous for the quality of its dials, as well as hands and markers, and I’ve had a chance on several occasions to travel to Japan as a guest of the company and see the processes behind making these elements of the watch. It’s hard to over-emphasize just how much hand-work goes into them.

You’re not, I should clarify, getting a completely hand-made and hand finished movement, but then again, you’re not getting that from anyone except a very few artisans like Roger Smith, Rexhep Rexhepi, or Philippe Dufour (although in the interests of clarity, there are Grand Seiko and Seiko Credor watches with hand-finished movements, usually from the Micro-Artist Studio in Nagano Prefecture, that are as finely done as the best you can get from Switzerland or Germany or anyplace else, albeit these watches live at the high end of the Grand Seiko price range).

What you are getting, however, are diamond-cut, mirror-polished hands and markers, and an elaborately crafted dial, which stand head and shoulders above the same components in many other watches that cost at least an order of magnitude more than this Grand Seiko. The beauty of Grand Seiko watches often lives very much in how the light plays on the dial and hands and to get an idea of just how scintillating the Shoshō dial is, take a look at Tim Mosso’s video review.

While it’s true that Grand Seiko has spent the last few years probing higher and higher price points, there are still many, many watches in its collections which represent what made GS a watch enthusiast’s favorite: Incredible bang for the buck, in terms of both technical quality and craftsmanship. The SBGJ249 is in that sense, a classic example of Grand Seiko’s watchmaking at its finest.

The 1916 Company is an Authorized Grand Seiko Retailer.