In 1924, the first watch to carry the Citizen name was a pocket watch created by the Shokosha Watch Research Institute, founded to develop key technical skills necessary to make watches for the Japanese market. The name “Citizen” was suggested by the mayor of Tokyo in the hope that watches—at the time, still an expensive luxury that few could afford—might one day be produced for all the citizens of Japan, and then for the world. In the century since, Citizen has never ceased pursuing the goal of making watches that offer true value to those who have chosen to make a Citizen watch part of their daily life.
One of the largest makers of watches in the world, Citizen today manufactures perhaps the widest range of wristwatches of any company on Earth in terms of design, engineering, and technical advances. The scope of the company’s production in many ways reflects the evolution of watchmaking in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. One of the first watch companies to use titanium, Citizen enjoys a history of technical advancements, from pioneering thin watches in the 1960s and developing the Promaster line of professional diver and pilot watches in the 1970s, to Eco-Drive light-powered technology and the Caliber 0100, accurate to within one second per year.
Highlighting a century of milestones, Citizen: The Essence of Time narrates the company’s continuing quest for ever greater precision, innovation, and creativity in expressing the beauty of the human experience of the passage of time, for all citizens of the world.
