Masahiro Kikuno

Masahiro Kikuno was born on 8 February 1983 in Fukagawa, a small city in Hokkaido, and trained through the WOSTEP course at Hiko Mizuno College of Jewelry in Tokyo, graduating in 2008. He was admitted as an AHCI candidate in 2011 and became a full member in 2013, making him one of the youngest watchmakers ever accepted into the Académie Horlogère des Créateurs Indépendants; he also teaches at a Japanese watchmaking school, passing on skills he largely worked out for himself. Kikuno has articulated his approach to hand-work with unusual precision: he distinguishes between tasks that could be automated but are still done manually only because labour happens to be cheaper for now, and tasks that no amount of investment could ever automate at all — and insists that choosing to do the latter by hand, even when a machine could theoretically stand in, creates a value shared by maker and owner alike that the finished object alone cannot carry. He likens it to home cooking made by one person for another: something no technology, however advanced, can substitute for.

Kikuno's reputation was established early with two remarkable 2011 pieces: a Perpetual Calendar Tourbillon built almost entirely by hand, and the Temporal Hour Watch (和時計, Wadokei) — a wristwatch reviving Japan's historic system of unequal 'temporal hours,' in which daylight and darkness are each divided into six segments whose length automatically lengthens and shortens with the seasons, a display believed to be the first of its kind ever built into a wristwatch. He has returned repeatedly to that idea across a growing family of Wadokei Revision pieces, each a unique, not-for-sale statement: Gyousyou (曉鐘, 'dawn bell,' 2016), Jikon (而今, 'this very moment,' 2017), and Zuisho (瑞祥, 'auspicious omen,' 2022). Alongside them sit other explorations of Japanese craft and symbolism translated into mechanical form: Orizuru (折鶴, an origami-crane-inspired piece, 2013), Mokume (木目, built around the traditional wood-grain metal technique mokume-gane, 2014), Sakubou (朔望, 'new moon and full moon,' 2017), and his newest work, Complication 'Inherit,' unveiled in 2025. Kikuno collaborates closely on engraving with Keiji Kanagawa, a self-taught engraver born in 1960 who began as an illustrator before teaching himself engraving through his own illustration technique, working as a professional engraver from 2006 and independently since 2014.

The Sakubou commission for a Western collector, documented at length in a widely-read collector interview, shows Kikuno's process in full: case, dial, and even movement size were built to the client's own proportions, and the case itself was cast in kuro-shibuichi, a Japanese copper-silver-gold alloy (roughly 87.3% copper, 9.9% silver, 2.8% gold) chosen deliberately because its copper content darkens and shifts with age — Kikuno has said he wants his watches to age alongside their owners rather than be preserved as untouched 'new,' treating that patination as transformation rather than decay, much like a person. Through conversation, the two men built the dial's imagery together: the client's own reflections on impermanence and new beginnings led Kikuno to propose a snake, a traditional Japanese symbol of shedding and renewal, encircled by a shimenawa — the twisted rice-straw rope that marks the boundary between the sacred and the profane in Shinto practice — hand-engraved by Kanagawa around the moon at the dial's centre. To sharpen legibility against the gold hands, Kikuno resurfaced the black dial in nanako (鱚子), a pattern of minutely uniform hemispheres traditionally found on samurai sword fittings, laid out entirely by hand in a technique he was using for the first time. Every commission ships with a handmade photo journal documenting each stage of construction — filing, sawing, polishing, tapping the mainplate, setting the rubies, the chemical treatment that deepens the dial to true black — opening with a line Kikuno writes to every client: his purpose, he says, is not simply to make watches, but to make people happy by making them, so that the owner feels not only the watch's own joy but the joy Kikuno felt while making it for them.