Seiko’s new Presage Japanese Garden watch has a playful cutout that’s truly hypnotising

Seiko has just added to its Presage Japanese Garden series with two new timepieces. The new Seiko Presage Japanese Garden watches are inspired by the beauty and zen of Japanese gardens, and feature a playful cutout that shows off the movement hidden underneath.

The Seiko Presage Japanese Garden collection is made up of watches inspired by traditional Japanese rock or dry gardens. More commonly known as Karesansui, the garden style is characterised by a miniature landscape composed of rocks, moss, trees, gravel and sand that are arranged to represent rippling water. 

The new Seiko Presage Japanese Garden watches are designed to reflect the aesthetics of Karesansui, and they definitely achieve that with their attractive dial designs and bold use of colours.

The first new watch in the series, the Presage Japanese Zen Gardens SSA463J1 comes in a fern green colour within a 41.8mm stainless steel case. The dial has a three-dimension pattern that represents raked sand within a Japanese dry garden. The hour markers are in Roman numerals and are made from stainless steel, just like the case and curved minute and hour hands.

The second watch is the Presage Japanese Zen Gardens SSA464J1, which comes in gold-toned sand. Inspired by Japanese temple gardens, the pattern of the dial almost splits the dial in half as one side shows off the zigzag pattern while the other is more plain and simple. It’s finished with a two-tone stainless steel bracelet.

Both watches are powered by Seiko’s in-house 4R3P automatic calibre movement which offers a 41 hour power reserve. Located at the nine o’clock position is an open-heart display which is the real showstopper of the two new watches. The circular cutout displays the movement in all its glory, and it’s playfully overlapped by a circular stop-second counter.

The green edition of the Seiko Presage Japanese Garden is £480 while the gold version is £520. Both are available to pre-order now at Seiko. As of writing, US pricing and availability has yet to be announced.