The Seiko Star Time, presented to Shohei Ohtani on July 3, marks his tenth year as a Seiko ambassador. It’s not for sale, will never be for sale, and there’s exactly one on Earth — currently strapped to the best baseball player alive. Oh, and also? It looks absolutely nuts. Instead of hands, the Star Time tells time with five stacked, concentric discs, each tracking a different scale of accumulated time: 24 hours, then 1,000, 10,000, 100,000, and finally a disc that runs all the way to one million hours.
That’s roughly 114 years — a full human lifetime, give or take. The discs turn continuously, so slowly you can’t see them move. Seiko named it “Star Time” for exactly that reason: like stars drifting across the sky, the motion is imperceptible in the moment but relentless. A little existential for a watch company, but let’s go with it.
The innermost disc handles the current time on a 24-hour scale, and the number “17” on the dial is oversized and painted red — a nod to Ohtani’s jersey number.
It’s built in 41.8mm High-Intensity Titanium, a chunky 17.4mm thick thanks to those five nested disc mechanisms, with a blue sapphire set in the crown and a strap cut to Ohtani’s exact wrist.
A watch you’ll never own
The watch market is in a weird place: with so many “limited editions,” it seems like every other release is limited to 500 pieces at four grand a pop. That much scarcity actually doesn’t mean much. So a brand making genuinely one of something — not 500, not 50, but one — is a refreshing kind of audacious.
The project started because Ohtani asked Seiko a genuinely vulnerable question: how much time do I have left in baseball? Most brands would’ve sent a careful written email from their PR people. Seiko spent three years engineering a mechanical answer.
Is that impractical? Wildly so. But every so often a big, conservative brand does something with zero commercial logic purely because it’s cool and means something, and I won’t be the guy complaining about that.
Where to buy see it
You can’t buy the Star Time, so don’t bother refreshing Seiko’s site. But Seiko posted a project film on its Star Time microsite, and if you want the closest thing you can own, the brand’s earlier Ohtani-inspired Seiko releases — the blue SBEJ023 and SBEJ025 — actually made it to shelves.
