The maker

A workshop that kept its own hours

Hakuren spent three decades as the quiet upper floor of a larger movement house in Nagaoka, supplying escapements to firms that never printed its name on a dial. The workshop only became a brand of its own in 1994, after the second generation of finishers argued that a hand-polished case deserved to be signed.

Everything still leaves the same four benches. Roughly 2,140 pieces a year, each with a case flank finished against a tin plate rather than a wheel — the reason the light travels across a Hakuren lug in one uninterrupted band.