It?s an often repeated mantra around here: every year is an anniversary year. And if a watch brand is going to be successful in today?s hyper competitive market where, frankly, a lot of brands are offering products that are remarkably similar to one another, they need to differentiate themselves. And looking at a calendar, and figuring out how many years it?s been since ?X? accomplishment or ?Y? watch was first released is (usually) a decent runway for explaining what makes you special. To that end, Grand Seiko is embarking on what will apparently be a year of celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Caliber 9S, a movement which has become foundational to Grand Seiko in the decades since its debut. 

The Caliber 9S has become a broad family of movements over the years, as Grand Seiko has continuously refined the caliber, including adding GMT functionality. Grand Seiko has used the 9S movements as a platform for their MEMS engineering techniques, which allow for insanely tight tolerances in movement making for certain key components, and you could probably argue that 9S movements represent the most traditional watchmaking currently practiced by the brand. Today, 9S movements are universally known to be reliable and rock solid high frequency calibers that often perform even better than the specs would indicate. Most recently, the 9S served as the springboard for the creation of Grand Seiko?s next generation Hi-Beat movement, the 9SA5.  While it might not be the flas...