An Exercise in Motion: The thinking behind Hitori Ginga (銀河) Tūrubi

Introduction

I have often felt that many of us who collect mechanical watches today eventually arrive at the same question when considering certain complications: what august purpose do they still serve? Some remain relatively easy to understand and assimilate. The chronograph like for instance measures elapsed time, the GMT follows another timezone, while an array of calendars organise the passing of days, months and sometimes years. Others occupy a more unusual territory and within, the Resonance is one while the tourbillon is another.

Therefore, with our latest special project, the Hitori Ginga Tūrubi series, I found myself returning to this question oh so often. What place does the tourbillon have in contemporary watchmaking, once much of its original practical necessity has disappeared?

It was not particularly because Hitori ever obliged to have one. If anything, that was precisely what made the idea axiomatically interesting.

The tourbillon occupies a strange position in watchmaking today. Created more than two centuries ago as an ingenious answer to a mechanical problem, the reasons collectors are drawn to this archaic complication now, myself included, are probably quite different. We have better and considerably simpler ways of making an accurate mechanical watch today. A tourbillon is firstly difficult to construct, then it consumes more energy and introduces additional complexity to accomplish something that modern watchmaking can address through other means with a cinch. Across both traditional haute horlogerie and industrial production, modern engineering has given us mechanical movements capable of remarkable chronometric performance without requiring a rotating escapement.

And yet, when you see a tourbillon moving, much of that reasoning suddenly becomes irrelevant.

There is something difficult to explain about watching an escapement make its way around within an aperture or open section of a dial, returning to the same position again and again. You understand perfectly well that it is no longer necessary, yet you continue getting drawn by it. I suspect this is true of many mechanical objects we choose to live with. Their value is not always found in what they ameliorate. Sometimes it lies simply in being able to understand how something works, to observe the thought and effort contained within it, and to find a certain pleasure in the fact that somebody decided it was still worth making.

This became the starting point for Tūrubi.

Rather than asking how Hitori could make a tourbillon, I became more interested in what a tourbillon might become if we treated it in the same way as any other timepieces we had designed. It still had to be comfortable, functional and made with pride that last through time. The proportions had to remain familiar to us, and the price had to remain within a realm that allowed the watch to be worn rather than merely admired. The mechanism could naturally become the visual focus, but everything surrounding it did not suddenly need to become louder. The restraint that has shaped our watches until now still had to be apparent when the Tūrubi was held in the hand and, more importantly, when it was worn on the wrist.

Most importantly, I did not want the complication to dictate the entire object around it. We started experimenting from there with an intention that was never to design a watch around the prestige associated with a tourbillon, but to grasp what might happen when the tourbillon instead had to adapt itself to the way we already believed a Hitori watch should be made.

Perhaps that is where this project really began: not with the complication itself, but with the idea that design should never remain completely stationary.

Why Tūrubi?

Now let us get the main question out of the way: why make a tourbillon in 2026, when nobody really needs one for practical timekeeping?

Perhaps precisely because we no longer need one.

The tourbillon itself was born from necessity. When Abraham-Louis Breguet developed the mechanism more than two centuries ago, there was a practical problem behind it: pocket watches spent much of their lives in a vertical position, making the regulating organ particularly susceptible to positional errors. By continuously rotating the escapement and balance, the tourbillon sought to average out some of those effects. Watchmaking has moved considerably forward since then. Today there are simpler and more efficient ways of achieving accuracy, superior methods of regulating movements, and certainly much easier ways of constructing a dependable watch.

This was one of the questions that stayed with me when we began the project. Despite losing much of its original necessity, the tourbillon never really disappeared. If anything, its place in modern watchmaking has become more curious. Like many collectors, I have always found myself drawn to it for a long period of time. Perhaps it is precisely because the tourbillon is no longer necessary that we are finally able to appreciate it for something else.

Mechanical watches themselves exist within much the same contradiction. None of us truly needs hundreds of small components, springs and gears assembled over many hours by skilled hands and machines, then carefully adjusted simply to tell us the time. A phone does this more accurately without us giving it a second thought. Yet we continue to wear mechanical watches because somewhere along the way their purpose moved beyond utility. We began appreciating the thoughts and processes behind them, the people who make them for decades and the strangely human pleasure of constructing an intricate mechanical object simply because we believe it is still worth making. Boy, are they worth making.

In that sense, perhaps the tourbillon is one of the purest expressions of this contradiction. You can see the escapement working in front of you, constantly turning and returning to where it began. There is little mystery about what it is doing, yet it remains mesmerising to observe. For collectors today, I think much of its charm lies here. The tourbillon has gradually moved from being a solution we needed to a mechanism we simply want to understand, experience and enjoy.

That distinction became important for Ginga Tūrubi. We did not approach the complication because we believed a modern wristwatch demanded one, nor because we wanted Hitori to suddenly make a statement about prestige. What interested us instead was what the tourbillon represents today: curiosity, patience and a willingness to pursue something mechanically difficult even when the rational argument for doing so has largely disappeared.

The Pleasure of the Unnecessary

I think there is something compelling about the continuation to make and ameliorate things we no longer really need.

The tourbillon belongs to this category. Its original purpose came from a very different period of watchmaking - one thats inessential today - but somehow it has survived long after that accuracy problem became less relevant. Today almost everything around us is expected to become faster, simpler and more efficient. The tourbillon does almost the opposite. It adds components, consumes more energy and requires considerably more effort to accomplish something that can now be achieved in much simpler ways. From a purely practical standpoint, it is meretricious and difficult to justify. Perhaps that is also where some of its charm begins to unfold.

There was no point on a roadmap where we decided that after five years we should make a tourbillon. I was actually quite cautious about it, but there were countless times when I found myself drawn back to this complication, which I’ve always found rather idiosyncratic. It carries a lot of history with it, and also certain expectations about what a tourbillon watch should look like, how it should be finished and even what it should represent. Traditionally, it sits somewhere near the top of mechanical watchmaking, though I wasn’t particularly interested in trying to enter that world. What stayed long with me instead was a much simpler question: what would happen if we stopped thinking about what a tourbillon was supposed to be and simply approached it in the same way we approached everything else?

This gradually changed the way I began looking at the mechanism. Over the years, much of what we have tethered at Hitori has been quite visible. Dial textures, colours, finishing, architecture and the Japanese landscapes that continue to influence me personally. These are tangible things you can immediately fathom. With this special project, I became interested in taking some of that curiosity further inside our watchmaking. We began to adopt the pithy rotating cage, becaming another material to work with. Not so different, in a way, from steel or texture or light. The difference was that this material happened to be constantly dancing in motion.

From there, we spent quite a lot of time trying to make everything around the tourbillon snazzy in Hitori’s style - intentional yet restrained. This sounds slightly contradictory. Usually when you put something mechanically unusual like a rotating cage at six o’clock, the natural tendency is to make sure everybody notices it. They ought to recognise it almost immediately.  I wanted to see whether we could do the opposite. The tourbillon should be present, and it should be enjoyable to observe, but the entire watch did not have to surrender itself to the vivacious mechanism. Hitori’s Ginga Tūrubi still needed to feel like one before it felt like a watch designed around a complication.

This is also why some of the seemingly ordinary decisions became important. The case remained at 39mm. We kept automatic winding and 100 metres of water resistance. We worked from the Miyota-derived Calibre HT01 rather than beginning with something deliberately exotic. None of these things are particularly romantic when written on a specification sheet, but together they determine what happens after the first few minutes of looking at the tourbillon are over. You close the clasp, go outside and wear the watch. I think that part is just as important.

So I don’t really see this tūrubi as Hitori trying to make a piece of haute horlogerie. It is closer to an experiment. We wanted to understand whether something historically associated with prestige and extravagance could become a little more familiar, and perhaps a little easier to live with. The tourbillon continues to rotate at six o’clock, but it does not entails or narrate the entire watch. Sometimes you notice it and watch the cage complete another rotation. 

Other times you forget about it completely. I like that relationship. Something can be mechanically unnecessary and still give us a reason to keep looking.

Starting With Something Familiar — Calibre HT01

When we started working on the movement for Ginga, I kept returning to familiarities.

The foundation was the Miyota 8215 sourced from the Japan’s movement manufacturer. It is not an exotic made-in-Japan movement, and perhaps that clearly was part of what interested me. It is a robust automatic that has existed quietly within Japanese watchmaking for a very long time, doing its job without asking for much attention. There is a certain honesty in objects like this. We have always been interested in taking something familiar and seeing whether, through a different process, it can arrive somewhere unexpected. For Ginga Tūrubi, this became the beginning of what we now coined the Hitori Calibre HT01.

The original architecture operates at 21,600 bph, or 3 Hz. For the HT01, the regulating system was extensively reconsidered around a one-minute flying tourbillon. The pallet fork and escape wheel were modified, together with the balance assembly and seconds pinion, while pumping up the beat-rate frequency to 28,800 bph, or 4 Hz. These changes by our partners sound quite technical when written down, but what interested me was ultimately something much straightforward. The fundamental character of the movement had changed. At six o’clock, the escapement was no longer hidden somewhere deep inside the watch. Instead, it sat within a rotating cage, moving right before our eyes and completing its journey every sixty seconds, almost like a mechanical ballet.

We spent long hours studying how this movement should sit within the dial. Because the flying tourbillon is supported from beneath, there is no conventional upper bridge holding the cage from above. Instead, we introduced a separate architectural bridge across the dial, not out of mechanical necessity, but because we felt it brought a sense of balance and structure to the entire composition. It does not support the tourbillon, although from certain angles your eye might initially think that it does. I very much liked this small ambiguity. One element remains completely still while another is constantly moving beneath it. There is a balance between the two that became increasingly important as the design developed.

But I also did not want the presence of a tourbillon to suddenly change everything we understood about making a Hitori watch. Ginga Tūrubi series still needed to be automatic. It needed to remain compact and comfortable enough that putting it on in the morning did not require a particular occasion. The mechanism is unusual, but the experience of owning the watch should not have to be. This was probably one of the essential things to preserve throughout the project.

There was also something meaningful to me about beginning with the Miyota architecture. We could have treated the tourbillon as an exercise in prestige and pushed it towards a much higher price point, but that never felt particularly relevant to what we were trying to do.

Instead, we took a proven Japanese mechanical foundation and asked considerably more from it. With the help of our adept movement specialists, the familiar architecture of the 8215 was extensively re-engineered around a flying tourbillon. Somehow, that felt much closer to Hitori’s own savoir-faire. The process became less about where the movement began, and more about how far we could take it, and what we could learn along the way.

I don’t think the HT01 is trying to redefine the tourbillon. As I previously mentioned, that was never the intention. It is simply our way of exploring one, using the things already familiar to us: Japanese mechanics, practical proportions, everyday wearability and a certain restraint in how everything is presented. Perhaps this is also why the Miyota foundation feels appropriate. Sometimes an interesting object does not have to begin with something extraordinary. It can become interesting through what you decide to do with it.

Nature In Motion Above, Mechanical Time In Motion Below

This is probably the part of the tourbillon project I wanted to spend a little more time talking about, because the tourbillon itself is only one component of the watch. From quite early on of the development phase, the 39mm proportions, case, bracelet, dial construction and opening at six o’clock were considered together. As I said, I did not want to start with a tourbillon and simply build something around it afterwards. The mechanism had to find its own place within the overall watch design, while everything surrounding it still needed to feel harmoniously natural in the hand and, more importantly, on the wrist.

During this period I found myself looking at several things from Japan, some of which had very little to do with watches. One was yoroi, the armour worn by the samurai. I wasn’t particularly interested in reproducing its decoration. What stayed with me was the construction. Many individual shaped plates overlap one another to create something protective and substantial, yet the complete structure still needs to move naturally with the body. It is a very practical solution, but there is also something alluring about the look and its rhythm created by those layers. We started looking at whether some of this thinking could exist within Ginga Tūrubi.

You can probably see it most clearly where the case meets the bracelet. The case folds into the first links, and the links continue this layered rhythm around the wrist. Nothing is literally shaped like armour, nor did I intended it to be. It was more useful to understand the principle behind the object than to reproduce its appearance. This is something I increasingly enjoy when looking at older things. Sometimes the construction itself provides a better reference than the decoration.

The 1968 G.S. V.F.A. Ref. 6185-8000 with its "integrated bracelet" form (source; watchesbysjx)

Another object I kept returning to was the Grand Seiko V.F.A. Ref. 6185-8000 from the late 1960s. I have admired this watch for a long time. Of course, there is the technical significance of the V.F.A. designation, but personally I have always been more interested in the case. There is something almost industrial about it. Broad surfaces, strong facets and very deliberate transitions between satin and polished finishing. It feels futuristic for its period, yet there is very little unnecessary embellishment. More than fifty years later, the design still feels surprisingly complete to me.

Yet I wasn’t interested in recreating the 6185-8000 either. There would be little point in doing that in the house of Hitori. I was leaning more in understanding why the case still feels so convincing today. Some of that thinking gradually found its way into this product design. We kept the broad surfaces but introduced more layering, softened some of the harder geometry and allowed the construction to flow directly into the bracelet. Most of the larger surfaces remain satin finished à la the sixties era, while smaller mirror-polished facets appear around the edges. Sometimes they catch the light quite strongly. Sometimes they do disappear.

I truly adore finishings on this Tourbillon piece when it behaves this way.

It does not always need to overly decorate an object. Sometimes it simply helps you understand its shape.

Working through these references also made me think about what actually makes something feel Japanese. It is quite easy to apply a traditional motif or pattern to a watch and explain where it came from afterwards. There is nothing necessarily wrong with this, but I wanted to see if the influence could exist a little deeper within the object. Yoroi therefore became a lesson in construction rather than decoration. The Japanese watches I collect became references for proportion, geometry and finishing rather than shapes to reproduce directly.

The bracelet became particularly important because I never really saw it as something separate from the case since beginning. I wanted both to read as one continuous structure while giving the Hitori Tourbillon a slightly sportier character. Here, two different periods started coalescing in an interesting way. There was the articulated construction of yoroi, but also the integrated case and bracelet watches that began appearing in Japan like the VFA, and Switzerland around the late 1960s and into the following decade. The links continue the layering of the case, but their real purpose remains very simple: they need to articulate comfortably around the wrist.

The clasp follows the same thinking. Its on-the-fly micro-adjustment is completely contemporary because this is simply useful when wearing a watch throughout the day. Its broad silhouette, however, carries something of the older Japanese clasps I have encountered through collecting vintage Grand Seiko. It is a very small reference. Most people probably won’t notice it.

I think that is fine.

When I look at Ginga now, there are things inside it that come from very different periods. Armour constructed centuries ago. Japanese watches from the late 1960s. Integrated sports watches from Japan and Switzerland. And then the requirements we have for something we want to wear today. None of these references needed to appear literally. They were simply things we studied and learned from while making the watch.

Perhaps that is also why I prefer to think of Ginga as one complete object rather than a tourbillon surrounded by a case and bracelet. The tourbillon is obviously the part that moves most visibly, but there are other kinds of movement happening throughout the watch. The bracelet articulates. The polished edges appear and disappear under light. The case changes slightly depending on how the wrist turns or the lights hit its surface.

In the end, all of these elements needed to work together before the watch felt finished.

Ginga: Colour, Space and Restraint

The dial has always been one of the areas the team and I spend a lot of time focusing on. Probably more than people would imagine. It is the face of the watch, and usually the first place where I can tell whether something feels right or not. The minutiae of a dial includes the size of a marker, the distance between two elements, the depth of a texture or the amount of empty space left on the surface. Individually these things are quite obscure, but together they determine much of the character of the finished watch.

Ginga presented a slightly different problem because there was already something very active at six o’clock. A tourbillon naturally attracts attention. I did not think we needed to make everything around it equally expressive. In fact, we started doing the opposite and leaving more space around the mechanism. The tourbillon could move while other parts of the dial remained relatively natural and calm.

This was partly how Ginga, 銀河, meaning galaxy, found its way into the project. I wasn’t interested in making something that literally looked like space. It was more the relationship between distance, small points of light and things continuously moving within it. The tourbillon completes one rotation every sixty seconds, almost like a small mechanical orbit at six o’clock. The “Stelline” star-shaped markers on individual metallic plaques developed from this idea, together with the Breguet-style numerals. I had also been looking at older watches again and noticed how even quite sober designs sometimes contained slightly unusual details that existed simply because somebody decided they should be there. I liked that freedom. At the centre, we continued the flowing texture first explored on Nexus. It brought something organic into what was otherwise becoming a fairly architectural watch.

We eventually arrived at two colours.

Seiryō feels closer to where Hitori has been. I have always liked blue, particularly when the surface underneath it allows the colour to behave differently depending on the light. I was pondering again about the waterways of Yanagawa during this process. Not necessarily their literal colour, but the way the surface can appear calm from a distance and considerably more complex when you look closely. Seiryō works in much the same way. Initially you see a blue watch. Then the texture, stars, finishing and movement of the tourbillon gradually become more apparent.

Murasame was a little less obvious. Lilac pink isn’t a colour that naturally comes to mind when thinking about a tourbillon, especially one surrounded by an integrated steel case. We tried it anyway. The softness of the colour against the harder case architecture became something I kept returning to. Depending on the light it can appear lilac, pale pink or slightly cooler. We adjusted it many times because very small changes made a surprisingly large difference. I wanted it to be invigorating without becoming overly decorative.

I don’t really think of Murasame as another colour option for Seiryō. They came from slightly different instincts. Seiryō stays closer to the line we already know, while Murasame moves a little outside it. Both use exactly the same architecture, yet the experience of wearing them is quite different. I find this interesting because it demonstrates how much colour can change an object without physically changing anything at all.

Maybe this is the Japanese influence I am most comfortable with. It does not always need to announce where it came from. It can exist in proportion, construction, finishing, colour or simply in the reasoning behind why something was executed. Ginga Tūrubi encapsulates all of those, containing references to armour, vintage Japanese watches, landscapes and words, but I don’t think any of them should individually explain the watch.

They are simply things we looked at while intentionally crafting it. And perhaps that is enough for us.

We eventually decided on 50 pieces of Seiryō and 50 pieces of Murasame for this ambitious project. The number wasn’t really about rarity as Ginga began as an experiment, and for some time we weren’t even certain it needed to become something we sold. Eventually it felt right to share it, but I still wanted there to be a natural end to the project. Fifty of each felt appropriate.

Making Something to Be Worn

In this last part of my reflection, I intended to return back to what was perhaps the most important goal of the entire project. I never wanted Hitori’s first tourbillon to become a safe queen. Far from that. The 39mm proportions, automatic winding, integrated bracelet, 100 metres of water resistance and general construction are all there for a fairly simple reason: the complication should not change the fundamental purpose of the object. It is still a watch, and a watch should be worn.

Ginga carries a different character from much of what we have made before. It is less about pursuing absolute refinement and more about trying to understand something unfamiliar. In that sense, I don’t really see it as a continuation but more like a departure. Over the past five years we have spent a lot of time exploring dials, finishing, colour, Japanese landscapes and architecture. With Tūrubi, we allowed ourselves to move somewhere else for a while and see what would happen when more of that curiosity was directed towards the mechanics and silhouettes from yesteryears.

This is also why I have come to realise the Ginga Tūrubi as an everyday tourbillon. That description may sound slightly contradictory, but it probably explains the watch better than anything else. It was not designed to spend most of its life in a safe and appear only on particular occasions. Like the intentions of every Hitori timepieces, I wanted it to be worn to work, on a weekend, while travelling, and through all the fairly ordinary moments in between. After everything that went into making Ginga Tūrubi mechanically more complicated, it still had to remain a watch you could simply put on in the morning without thinking too much about it.

Perhaps this brings us back to the question that started the project in the first place. Why make a tourbillon today?

I don’t think the answer needs to be accuracy anymore. Modern watchmaking has given us far simpler ways of achieving that. Nor do I think a tourbillon needs to justify itself through preponderance. For me, its relevance today has become something far more emotional and mechanical, and perhaps that exemplifies my point.

There is still a peculiar fascination in watching an escapement rotate before your eyes, completing the same whimsical journey every sixty seconds. You know perfectly well that none of it is necessary, yet somehow, you find yourself mesmerised by it anyway.

Maybe this is also why collectors continue to be interested in these things. Mechanical watches themselves are no longer necessary objects, yet we continue to spend time learning about them, collecting them and forming relationships with them. There is pleasure in understanding how something works, and perhaps even more pleasure when somebody has chosen a more difficult way of making it work simply because the result is interesting.

Our special Ginga Tūrubi is our answer to that curiosity.

It is not Hitori attempting to make an ultra luxurious watch, nor is it our declaration that we have arrived somewhere new. I see it more simply as an experiment that became something we ourselves wanted to wear. We took a mechanism with more than two centuries of history and asked whether it could exist within the kind of watch we already believed in: compact, automatic, functional, culturally familiar to us and restrained enough that the complication did not have to exemplify the entire object.

In the end, perhaps that was the most meaningful  thing we learned from making Tūrubi. Something does not have to be necessary to have meaning, and something mechanically extraordinary does not have to be treated extraordinarily.

Sometimes, its meaning only reveals itself on the wrist.