Independent watchmaker Jiro Katayama always thought he would spend his days working alone on a shoestring budget in his studio in the Otsuka district of Tokyo’s Toshima Ward.

So, receiving a top prize at one of the watchmaking industry’s most prestigious events, the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Geneve (GPHG), which recognizes outstanding wristwatches of the year, knocked him for a loop.

Katayama’s Otsuka Lotec No. 6 won the Challenge Watch Prize, which is given to watches that cost 3,000 Swiss francs (511,000 yen, or $3,300) or less.

The face of the prize-winning mechanical watch has a retro design reminiscent of an old meter, and its hour and minute hands move in a fan-like arc.

Katayama, 53, attended the ceremony in Geneva on Nov. 13, 2024. However, he hadn’t been told in advance that he would win the grand prize.

“I had never imagined I’d give a speech in English at such a glamorous event,” he recalled.

Katayama started his career as an industrial designer.

After graduating from a professional school, he landed a job at an affiliate of Toyota Motor Corp. where he worked on designing the Corolla Levin and other cars.

He went independent at age 30, and made a living by working on camera lenses and other items.

A major turning point in Katayama’s career came in 2008, when he bought a lathe online.

He started making metal hammers and other tools before trying his hand at making watch cases. He took a growing interest in the internal mechanics of watches, called movements, which required expert knowledge and sophisticated skills to make.

SELF-TAUGHT MASTER

Katayama decided to learn watchmaking on his own.

“I did research online and single-mindedly studied the structure, made prototypes and failed over and over again,” he said. “But these days you can learn most basic stuff by just googling it.”

Around 2012, he created a watch that displayed the time with a rotating disc by installing his own device onto commercially available watch movements.

His watches began to attract buyers after he wrote about his manufacturing processes and other details on his blog.

Demand for his watches grew even further after they were featured in a magazine, prompting Katayama to establish his Otsuka Lotec brand.

At first, Katayama worked alone and produced everything himself. However, he could only make about 70 watches a year and demand for his devices—with their unique designs and high degree of precision—continued to grow.

“While I was happy about it, I found myself constantly busy making products,” he said. “I was exhausted and beginning to worry whether I should go on like this.”

Just then, Hajime Asaoka, a world-renowned independent watchmaker, offered a helping hand. Asaoka had made Japan’s first wristwatch equipped with a tourbillon—a complex mechanism designed to increase accuracy.

Kataoka began receiving support from Asaoka’s company, Precision Watch Tokyo Co., in 2023, and can now produce around 200 Otsuka Lotec timepieces a year.

This was a second turning point in Katayama’s career that would eventually catapult him onto the world stage.

“What made me happy more than anything else was that I could focus my energy on developing future projects, imagining new designs and making improvements,” he said.

In addition to the No. 6 watch, Otsuka Lotec currently offers the No. 7.5, which displays the movements of the hour, minute and second in three small windows.

The No. 5 Kai, a new model unveiled on Jan. 15, features a mechanism that displays the time with numeral disks that move like satellites and fixed readings.

The No. 6 sells for 440,000 yen, the No. 7.5 for 352,000 yen and the No. 5 Kai, which will be added to the lineup in March, for 748,000 yen.

Due to high demand, the wristwatches are sold through a lottery system, with purchase requests accepted only on the official website.

Deliveries are only available within Japan, further increasing their rarity.

Otsuka Lotec watches have sold for twice their retail price on the secondary market.

Five days before he received the GPHG prize on Nov. 13 last year, Katayama was recognized as a “gendai no meiko” (contemporary master craftsman) by the labor ministry of Japan.

Then, on Nov. 22, a special black variant of his No. 6 watch, called the Shinonome, sold at the Phillips auction house in Hong Kong for HK$553,400 ($71,000, or 11 million yen) at a charity auction for survivors of the Noto Peninsula earthquake. The all funds were donated to help reconstruction efforts in the region.

“The contemporary master craftsman designation, winning an international prize and the auction result ... I couldn’t have achieved any of these things without help,” Katayama said.

“I still have watches that I want to make. From now on, I want to take on the challenge of creating complicated high-end watches under a different brand from Otsuka Lotec, making the internal mechanisms myself from scratch.”

For more details, visit the official website at (https://otsuka-lotec.com/).