For sale - Citizen Auto-dater 200m Skin Diver
The Citizen Auto-dater 200m Skin Diver
Up for sale is this extremely rare variant of the already rare Citizen Auto-dater 200m Skin Diver - far more often seen with a black dial and black bezel.
As many will no doubt be aware, my primary focus of interest in watches lies with vintage Grand Seiko, but after falling down a couple of slippery collecting slopes - one into the 1960’s Seiko Divers, and the other into high end Citizen watches of the same era as the vintage Grand Seikos, I guess it was only inevitable that at some point in time I would pick up a couple of Citizen dive watches from the 1960’s.
One of the challenges with collecting vintage Citizen is that there is far less written on them than you will find for Seiko, but that certainly doesn’t mean there aren’t some seriously impressive references in Citizen’s back catalogue (hello, a 500m diver that is Chronometer certified!). Unfortunately what it does mean is that the “knowledge” regarding many of the Citizen timepieces can be somewhat sparse.
Fortunately, there are a couple1 of websites2 that I have found that have many fascinating articles relating to Citizen watches in this era. But be warned - once you start learning more about Citizen’s history, you might find yourself also slipping down the same slopes that I did…
And what better timepiece to kick off that slide, than the one that I am listing for sale!
Both of the websites I link to in the footnotes have well researched and passionate articles on the vintage Citizen dive watches. Sweephand has a single article3 covering pretty much every mechanical diver Citizen released between 1962 and 1980 grouped by depth rating, and the Citizen Guy has a summary level dive watch webpage4, from which you can jump to his specific article5 on the reference featured here.
Rather than re-write what these two fine researchers have written on Citizen’s 200m Skin Diver, I would encourage you to support them by heading over to their respective websites and learning about the references from their own words.
From a historical perspective however, there are two key points to take home. Firstly, Citizen’s watch almost without question pre-dates Seiko’s legendary 62MAS - a watch rated to 150m, and oft-referred to as the first Japanese dive watch; and secondly, there is no way to precisely date the Citizen!
As you may have noticed from the video, the caseback doesn’t have a serial number stamped on it -
We know that some watches produced by Citizen prior to this reference did have case serial numbers that reveal their production date. For example, the earliest examples of the Citizen Chronometer (such as the one in my full set of the reference that I will be listing for sale in due course) have case serial numbers stamped on the inside of the caseback, with mine showing production in June 1962.
Both of the authors on the websites linked to in this listing state that it is assumed the 200m Skin Diver commenced production in 1962. One thing that we can state with absolute certainty however is that a reference with the same 21 jewel movement found in this watch was first launched to the public on January 16th 1963.
The following is a scan from an article in the February 1963 issue of the Japanese trade publication, “The Horological International Correspondence”.
I won’t provide a full translation, but one of the interesting nuggets of information revealed by the article is that this was actually Japan’s first domestically produced auto-winding movement with a calendar.
Clearly the watch pictured is not the skin diver, but at the very least it puts a hard boundary on when the skin diver could have come to market, since the same movement is found in both watches. Had it launched at the same time as the dress watch shown, then of course it is possible that production would have started sometime in 1962.
Having said, and linked to, all of that, I rather suspect that this is a watch that anyone considering purchasing is already more than well aware of, and perhaps has been on the lookout for, for a considerable amount of time - a quick perusal through the last 10 years worth of auction on Yahoo Japan shows just two examples coming up for sale!
As should be evident from the video, the watch is in absolutely superb condition, and there really is not much on the negative side to call to your attention, perhaps excepting the slight aging of the lume on the handset.
Price and delivery
The watch is priced at US $2,900, including worldwide fully insured courier delivery, and will be supplied on the modern “tropic” style strap as seen in the video.
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to simply reply to this newsletter if you are reading it in your inbox, or reach out to me by email at watchdxb@substack.com
Really like that lume layout