Vintage Orient Wristwatches

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Even though the first Orient Star wristwatch was not produced until 1951, the roots of this Japanese wristwatch manufacturer go back to 1901, when a pocket-watch wholesaler named Shogoro Yoshida opened for business in downtown Tokyo. By 1934,...
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Even though the first Orient Star wristwatch was not produced until 1951, the roots of this Japanese wristwatch manufacturer go back to 1901, when a pocket-watch wholesaler named Shogoro Yoshida opened for business in downtown Tokyo. By 1934, Toyo Tokei Manufacturing, as the renamed company was known, began making its own wristwatches, which necessitated the opening of the firm's Hino Factory in 1936. Hino boomed until World War II brought business to an abrupt halt. Toyo Tokei Manufacturing didn't recover until 1949, and when it did, it reopened for business in 1950 as Tama Keiki Company, before changing its name yet again to the Orient Watch Company, which suited the company's first wristwatch, the Orient Star, a blue-handed mechanical watch whose movement was made in Japan rather than being imported from Switzerland. Indeed, the mechanical movements in vintage Orient wristwatches, including the Orient Star Dynamic and top-of-the-line Royal Orient models, are much praised by horologists and collectors alike. One early market for these wristwatches was China. The 1960s was a great decade for the Orient Watch Company, and many of its most collected models date from those years. The company's development of an automatic movement in 1961 led to the Super Auto the following year. Its Grand Prix 100 from 1964 predates the watch world preoccupation with the Rolex Daytona, which made its film debut on Paul Newman's wrist in the 1969 auto-racing movie, "Winning." In 1965, Orient introduced a dive watch (the King Diver 1000) and in 1967 it released the Fineness, which briefly held the record as the thinnest wristwatch on the planet. In the early 1970s, Orient offered its customers a new chronograph, the Jaguar Focus, as well as a new movement dubbed the Caliber 46. Calendar watches abounded in the 1970s, so Orient kept up with its competitors. To capitalize on the popularity of the Accutron, which was doing wonders for Bulova's bottom line, Orient released an
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