News: Seiko Creates A One-Off With The Star Time Watch For Shohei Ohtani

Seiko has unveiled a unique mechanical watch to mark baseball player Shohei Ohtani’s10th anniversary as the brand’s ambassador in Japan. The company spent around three years developing the Seiko Star Time after drawing inspiration from Ohtani’s question: “How much time do I have left in my baseball career?”

Instead of measuring elapsed seconds or featuring traditional complications, the Star Time tracks cumulative time across five scales, reaching up to one million hours, or just over 114 years. Seiko says no other wristwatch currently displays such a duration using a system of five rotating discs. Seiko Chairman, CEO, and CCO Shinji Hattori recently presented the watch to Ohtani. As a one-off creation, the Star Time will remain truly unique and will not enter production.

Seiko Star Time: The facts

Seiko houses the Star Time’s in a 41.8mm High-Intensity Titanium case with a 17.4mm profile (including the massively domed crystal). Instead of conventional hands, the watch uses a blue multilayer display with five concentric rotating discs. These discs track cumulative periods of 24 hours, 1,000 hours, 10,000 hours, 100,000 hours, and up to one million hours, while the innermost disc also displays the current time in a 24-hour format. During the development process, Ohtani and Seiko’s engineering team decided to set a single diamond into each rotating disc, giving the display its distinctive appearance.

To make the unusually thick display discs possible, Seiko developed a dedicated movement architecture and reworked both the movement layout and assembly process for this project. Protecting the display is a box-shaped sapphire crystal with an antireflective coating on the inside. Seiko paired the watch with a blue silicone strap made to fit Ohtani’s wrist and gave the watch a 10-bar water resistance rating, making it suitable for everyday wear despite its experimental concept.

Rather than producing a limited edition, Seiko built the Star Time as a unique piece exclusively for Shohei Ohtani. The company does not intend to sell the watch and has not announced plans to develop a production version of the concept.

*In the header image, you see Shohei Ohtani (left) and Seiko Watch Corporation Chairman, CEO, and CCO Shinji Hattori (right).