Norifumi Seki is a Japanese watchmaker whose graduation project—a pocket watch with a rotating spherical moon and vertical calendar drums—won the 2020 F.P. Journe Young Talent Competition. By September 2024, he was Head of Watchmaking at Tokyo-based Quiet Club, where he was focused on developing watches in small numbers and refining his craft.
Who is Norifumi Seki?
Seki is a Japanese watchmaker whose work brings mechanical function together with an unusual visual idea. His best-known early creation is a school graduation pocket watch built around a spherical moon-phase display and a drum calendar. F.P. Journe named him the 2020 winner of its Young Talent Competition, identifying him as 23 and from Tokyo (F.P. Journe Young Talent Competition).
In a September 2024 interview, Seki described himself as Head of Watchmaking at Quiet Club. That role places him within a watchmaking project rather than establishing a personal-name brand: at the time, he said such a brand remained a longer-term dream without a clear plan.
How did Seki get into watchmaking?
Seki told MONOCHROME that his interest began at about 17. After buying a watch with money from a part-time job, he became curious about how it worked. Around the same time, a documentary about Japanese independent watchmaker Masahiro Kikuno showed him that an individual could make a watch by hand. Seki began researching the craft and bought George Daniels’ book.
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He went on to study at Hiko Mizuno Watchmaking School in Tokyo. During his final year, he made the pocket watch that would become his competition-winning graduation project. Before and alongside that development, he spent 3.5 years working at a vintage watch shop, repairing and restoring a range of watches, according to his 2024 MONOCHROME interview (MONOCHROME interview with Norifumi Seki).
What is Seki’s spherical moon-phase pocket watch?
It is a graduation project that makes the display the watch’s central idea: a large spherical moon-phase indicator sits alongside calendar drums. Seki explained that a large, flat moon disc would consume too much dial space. A sphere offered the scale he wanted while leaving room for the other indications.
F.P. Journe’s competition profile gives the titanium sphere a diameter of 20 mm and describes Seki making the base plate, bridges, and the calendar and moon-phase mechanisms. The profile also notes that much of the going train came from a Valjoux 7750. In other words, the watch was not simply a complete off-the-shelf movement: the existing components formed part of a project whose distinctive display and key mechanisms Seki made himself (F.P. Journe Young Talent Competition).
The pocket watch won F.P. Journe’s 2020 Young Talent Competition. The award recognized a technically ambitious student project whose mechanism and visual concept were closely connected: the sphere solved Seki’s space problem while giving the moon phase a striking physical presence.
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What is Seki doing at Quiet Club?
In September 2024, Seki said he was Quiet Club’s Head of Watchmaking. He hoped to make more watches under the Quiet Club name, with lower production numbers and continued improvement of his skills as priorities. Those remarks describe his plans at the time of the interview, not a claim about current production or availability.
Quiet Club’s Fading Hours was listed among the finalists for the 2025–2026 Louis Vuitton Watch Prize, with Tokyo, Japan, given as its location. The official prize listing establishes finalist status; it does not establish that the watch won (Louis Vuitton Watch Prize finalists). The available listing does not provide technical specifications for Fading Hours, so it should not be treated as a direct technical sequel to Seki’s student pocket watch.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.The idea behind Seki’s watchmaking
Seki’s 2024 interview suggests that unusual mechanics are not an end in themselves. He said: “A watch should be functional and make sense in real life, but also be divine and involve a degree of spirituality.” The spherical moon watch makes that balance tangible: its display has a practical reason for its form, yet its scale and movement also give the indication an almost sculptural quality.
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