Citizen

Citizen's origins trace back to 1918, when the Shokosha Watch Research Institute was founded in Tokyo by Kamekichi Yamazaki with the goal of developing a genuinely Japanese watchmaking industry. In 1924 the institute presented its first pocket watch, and to name it the company turned to the mayor of Tokyo at the time, Gotō Shinpei, who suggested the name "Citizen": an explicit wish for a watch destined to become common use and appreciated by everyday "citizens", not a luxury reserved for the few. In 1930 the business was formalized as Citizen Watch Co., Ltd.

Over the following decades Citizen built its identity on a rare degree of industrial integration: it designs and produces in-house not only movements but also cases, crystals and components, becoming one of the very few truly vertically integrated watchmaking groups in the world. 1959 brought the first widely recognized technical leap, the Parawater, the first waterproof watch made in Japan; 1973 the brand's first quartz watch; 1976 the revolution of light-powered energy with the Crystron Solar Cell, forerunner of what would become Eco-Drive technology. In parallel, from the 1980s onward, the Promaster line carried forward a genuine diving tradition, including the 1985 Aqualand, the world's first watch with an integrated electronic depth sensor.

In 1960 Citizen entered an import-export agreement with the American company Bulova, a relationship that in 2008 turned into the direct acquisition of the Bulova Corporation, expanding the group toward the US market and toward a higher price segment, mechanical as well as quartz. Bulova nonetheless retains its own identity and history, already told on a dedicated Chronopedia page: here the account remains centered on the Citizen brand and its lines.