Masaharu Wada on Japanese Watch Culture and Building Hodinkee Japan

Masa’s journey from tech startup to watch industry pioneer shows how Japanese collectors value curation, relationships, and mastery of tradition before breaking rules—and how a single Instagram like can change your career.

Summary of Masaharu Wada on Japanese Watches, Taste, and Collecting. Every timestamp links into the original audio.

The short version

00:06:37 — Masa initially entered watch collecting out of necessity during his startup days—he had money but no time, so instead of buying a car he purchased a Rolex Submariner Date because he could wear it constantly at the office.
00:07:53 — He started a personal watch blog in 2017 purely as a hobby to learn about web development, with no SEO strategy or commercial ambitions, just writing about watches because he loved them.
00:12:45 — When deciding to quit his tech job to pursue watches full-time, his CEO supported his decision because the company couldn’t help him with watch industry connections, demonstrating an unusually gracious Japanese corporate response to resignation.
00:14:22 — Masa didn’t apply for the Hodinkee Japan job—he merely liked their hiring post on LinkedIn, which led to HR reaching out directly, and then the CEO of Hearst Japan contacted him on Instagram after seeing his watch content.
00:17:15 — Masa realized early that the best way to experience watches as a collector wasn’t necessarily owning everything, but instead being connected to a community where he could appreciate watches his friends owned.
00:27:05 — Japanese watch culture emphasizes detailed curation and appreciation of subtle differences because of societal focus on learning rules deeply before distinguishing oneself, unlike the broader approach common in the US market.
00:38:23 — When Masa published an article about Neo Hida’s watches, American commenters criticized the pricing because the movement wasn’t in-house, while Japanese collectors appreciated the work regardless of that specification.
00:47:26 — Masa shifted from collecting iconic watches like Rolex and Patek Philippe to collecting based on memories and relationships, prioritizing watches from watchmakers he knows and experiences he’s shared.
00:54:36 — His grandfather’s Rolex became precious not just as an object but through the experience of traveling to Zurich to research its provenance with his father, ultimately strengthening their relationship.

In depth

From tech burnout to accidental watch journalist

Masa’s entry into the watch world wasn’t driven by aesthetic obsession or inherited taste—it was a byproduct of overwork. As a young product manager at a Japanese tech startup, he was putting in such punishing hours that he was barely leaving the office, let alone spending the money he was earning 00:06:37. When his boss showed up wearing a Cartier and suggested he treat himself, Masa’s first instinct was a car, specifically an Audi TT 00:10:21. But the math didn’t work: he had nowhere to park it, no time to drive it, and was already paying rent on an apartment he never slept in. A watch, worn constantly at his desk, became the only purchase that matched his actual life. His first was a Rolex Submariner Date 00:11:36, and it functioned less as jewelry than as a kind of trophy for the hours he was logging.

The blog followed from a similarly oblique motive. His company wanted him to pivot into building web services, a skill he didn’t have, so he started a blog as a self-directed crash course in how websites worked 00:07:26. Watches were simply the subject he cared enough about to write about for free, with zero SEO strategy and no plan to monetize 00:07:53—he was effectively doing unpaid night-shift journalism on top of a demanding day job, writing watch news from his office chair after Baselworld dropped, before clocking out. The audience only mattered to him in retrospect, once the page views made clear there was a sustainable thing here.

What’s notable is how undramatic his break from tech was, structurally and emotionally. He didn’t anguish over the decision so much as validate it with the people around him, and the response he got back—most notably from his CEO, who acknowledged the company had nothing to offer him in the watch world and let him go without friction 00:12:45—reads as a small case study in a certain Japanese professional grace that both Masa and Jeremy flag as unusual. That same night, almost too neatly for fiction, he read that Hodinkee was launching a Japan edition, despite his blog having been built in conscious admiration of Hodinkee’s storytelling style 00:13:40.

The hiring process that followed was almost accidental. Masa never submitted an application; he clicked “like” on a LinkedIn hiring post, and that single gesture triggered outreach from HR, followed by a direct message from the Hearst Japan CEO on Instagram, who’d evidently been tracking his blog and social presence 00:14:22. It’s a small illustration of how, in a media environment still oriented around print and institutional credentials, a personal, visible online following functioned as its own credential—enough to make him employee number one at Hodinkee Japan despite having no formal journalism background.

Owning less, belonging more: watches as community currency

One of the more pointed ideas Masa articulates is that he reached, early and somewhat by accident, a conclusion many collectors take years of expensive mistakes to arrive at: you don’t need to own something to meaningfully experience it. He describes realizing that he could never personally acquire every watch he loved, but if a friend owned it, he could still feel genuine satisfaction from that proximity 00:17:27. This wasn’t resignation so much as a reframing of what collecting is actually for. Jeremy pushes on this point directly, drawing a distinction between collectors who treat acquisition as the entire point and those who derive satisfaction from appreciation and access, using Atsuko Lodek’s work as his example of something he admires without needing to possess 00:18:04.

This ethos ties into a broader claim Masa makes about Japanese watch media’s difference from what preceded it. Traditional Japanese watch publishing was print-dominated and comparatively anonymous—collectors, he says, preferred to keep their faces out of coverage entirely 00:18:48. Hodinkee’s model of personality-driven storytelling and video was a genuine break from that convention, and part of what drew Masa toward the brand even before he worked there. But it also exposed a tension he had to navigate personally: Japanese publishing culture treats the chief editor as a near-sacred authority figure, while Masa entered as an outsider from tech with no legacy standing 00:22:54. His workaround wasn’t to wait for institutional credibility but to build relationships directly—saying yes to essentially every meeting request that came through Instagram DMs, which is how he ended up networked with figures like Mark Cho and Ben Clymer, who in turn funneled international collectors and VIPs his way 00:23:41.

The community framing resurfaces later in a more personal register when Masa describes how his own collecting priorities have shifted. Early on, he deliberately built a collection of category-defining watches—a Submariner, a Royal Oak, a Lange 1—because he felt he needed to internalize the “rules” of watchmaking before he could meaningfully deviate from them or develop independent judgment 00:48:00. That accumulation phase has given way to something more relational: he now describes actively collecting memories and relationships embodied in objects, rather than chasing canonical pieces for their own sake 00:47:26. The watches that matter most to him now are ones tied to specific people and moments, not status markers.

The in-house movement debate and the price of Neo Hida’s restraint

A sharper disagreement surfaces around how value gets assigned to independent Japanese watchmaking, and it exposes a real gap between international and domestic audiences. Masa recounts publishing a piece about Naoya Hida for an English-language audience and being met with a wave of comments criticizing the pricing on the grounds that the movement wasn’t in-house and the overall specification didn’t justify the cost 00:38:23. The reaction from Japanese readers to the same watch was essentially the opposite: appreciation for the obsessive attention Hida put into details like case engraving, proportion, and edge shaping, with no complaints about price at all 00:38:39.

Jeremy uses this as a jumping-off point to challenge the in-house movement fixation more broadly, arguing that it’s become a reflexive shorthand new collectors reach for to judge a brand’s legitimacy, often without much reasoning behind it 00:39:05. Masa’s response isn’t to dismiss the in-house standard outright but to relativize it: Hida spent decades inside the industry, including time handling brands like Jaeger-LeCoultre through an importing and distribution company, before launching his own line, and that accumulated experience and taste is itself a form of value that can’t simply be bought or replicated by a newer brand building everything in-house from scratch 00:40:00. In other words, the argument isn’t that in-house movements don’t matter, but that they’re one proxy among several, and Hida’s restraint—deliberately keeping prices below what his reputation and skill could probably command—was itself a choice rooted in respect for the collectors who’d followed him before he went more public with the brand 00:37:38.

That restraint, per Masa, is partly tactical and partly cultural: pricing too aggressively risks alienating the earliest, most loyal collectors who supported the maker before wider recognition arrived 00:37:45. It also connects to a broader observation about exchange rates and market positioning—Masa notes that a weak yen makes Japanese independents look inexpensive by comparison to Swiss equivalents, but is careful to say that affordability isn’t really the ambition; it’s closer to restraint 00:36:58. The unresolved tension here is real: is this pricing philosophy sustainable as global demand grows, or is it a byproduct of small scale that will erode once these brands are forced to expand?

Scarcity, raffles, and whether constraint is strategy or just capacity

The conversation turns skeptical when Jeremy raises the broader climate around Japanese independents: watches that are essentially impossible to get, sold via raffle, with resale prices climbing far past retail—an Otsuka Lotec reportedly listed near $13,000 above its original price on the secondary market 00:42:20. Jeremy frames this bluntly as a question of intent: is this scarcity manufactured as a marketing tactic, the way certain Western brands engineer waitlists? Masa’s answer is more deflating than conspiratorial. In Otsuka Lotec’s case, he says, the brand simply doesn’t have the infrastructure to ship or manufacture at any real scale, and selling only within Japan is a function of limited capacity, not calculated exclusivity 00:42:36. The raffles exist because there isn’t enough product to meet demand through ordinary retail channels, full stop 00:42:48.

He extends this into a structural explanation that’s easy to miss if you only look at demand-side hype: Japan has very few formal watchmaking schools—he cites essentially two, one in Tokyo and one in Omi—which creates a persistent bottleneck on skilled labor across the entire domestic industry, independent or otherwise 00:44:09. Every brand, regardless of ambition, is fishing from the same tiny pool of trained watchmakers. He illustrates the extreme end of this with Masahiro Kikuno, a member of the AHCI who produces only one or two watches a year, largely because he also teaches at a watchmaking school and isn’t chasing scale or wealth in any aggressive way 00:44:42.

There’s a smaller but telling thread here about craft purity versus pragmatism. Kikuno had long been a hand-everything purist, but teaching students on a graduation timeline forced him to introduce a CNC machine at home so students could actually complete watches within the constraints of their coursework 00:45:32. Masa directly asks him whether adopting automation felt like a compromise of principle, and Kikuno’s answer is notably unresolved—an acknowledgment that it’s fine, without much elaboration, even as he used that same machine to prototype an entirely new escapement design and to build an extraordinarily complex piece combining a minute repeater, tourbillon, and chronograph 00:46:01. The implication Masa draws is that craft ideology in Japan’s independent scene is adaptive rather than dogmatic: tools change, but the underlying hand-driven ethos and small-batch scarcity remain largely circumstantial rather than a calculated scarcity play, even if the market effect looks identical from the outside.

The grandfather’s Rolex and watches as relationship infrastructure

The clearest articulation of Masa’s current collecting philosophy comes through the story of his grandfather’s Rolex Oyster Perpetual Date, a small 34mm piece that reached him with no box, no papers, and almost no attached history—just the fact that his grandfather had been stationed in Germany from 1960 to 1963, during an era when ordinary Japanese citizens needed special government permission to travel abroad at all 00:53:57. The watch passed to Masa’s father and eventually to Masa himself, but more significantly, it became the occasion for repairing a previously distant relationship with his father—the two reportedly weren’t close until they bonded over both being watch people 00:54:24.

Masa’s choice to personally investigate the watch’s provenance in Zurich is where the story becomes something closer to detective work than collecting. Armed only with a serial number and a vague sense that his grandfather had bought the piece from a shop in the city, he contacted a friend working at Beyer, one of the old Zurich retailers, and asked them to search their historical records 00:55:28. The search initially pointed to a slightly mismatched serial number at a different shop before Beyer’s staff found a record of a watch sold to a Japanese customer with a serial that differed only in its final digit—plausibly a handwriting transcription error from an era when all such records were written by hand 00:56:13. Masa acknowledges he can’t actually prove this is the same watch, but chooses to believe it is, given how statistically unlikely it would have been for multiple Japanese travelers to be buying Rolexes in Zurich at that time 00:56:32.

The emotional payoff isn’t really about authentication at all—it’s that pursuing the question took him physically into his grandfather’s world, including a restaurant from that same era where Beyer staff took him to eat, layering new memory onto an old, previously undocumented object 00:57:25. Jeremy’s reaction frames this as the moment that reverses his earlier dismissiveness about box-and-papers completism: a watch with zero paperwork turned out to carry more meaning than nearly anything fully documented in his collection, precisely because the provenance had to be rebuilt through relationships and travel rather than purchased as a credential 00:58:04. For Masa, this crystallizes into a broader professional and personal thesis: watches are an entry point, but the sustaining appeal of the work is the people they connect him to—other collectors, watchmakers, retailers, and in this case, his own father 00:57:47.

Summarised automatically. Listen to the original for the full conversation — this is not a substitute for it.