I picked up this Citizen Tsuyosa around 2 months ago now. So that’s probably long enough to have an opinion on it. The Tsuyosa is an great watch, but a fundamentally flawed one.
The affordable watch category though is about flaws. The perfect affordable watch, is the one with the flaws you can live with and maybe in fact joy. It’s like anything in life, the best deal for you is always the product with the flaw you can live with – be that in love or in house shopping.
It’s the same for affordable watches. Shorter power reserves and bad accuracy. Bad bracelets and clasps. Poor case and dial finishing. Accepting this I think is key to finding the affordable watch for you. The Dalai lama said “Happiness is not something ready-made. It comes from your own actions.”
See to me that means you’ve got to proactively go after what makes you happy and in watches I think that comes from feeling. So today I will not be telling you that the watch as its an integrated bracelet piece wheres more like a 41 or 42mm than a 40 mm, or its 40 hour power reserve, or even complain about the watch’s fiddly crown
Instead I want to focus on the feeling i get from this watch. If we go back a few years to a sunny afternoon where i was visiting a friend in Oxford. We were walking through town and for the first time in a long time I saw someone wearing a rolex day date on a presidential bracelet, it was quite loose resting towards the edge of his wrist and it got seared into my mind. How I would like to be this 40 something year old man with beautiful partner in tow and you’re almost certain an Aston martin in the garage. You just know that guys life must feel pretty good. Or at least what I’ve projected onto him.
And with the Tsuyosa’s presidential style bracelet, I get to feel closer to that as I saunter into the office, head out to a meeting or standing at a bar. And while not much it’s enough to remind me of this and feel a little bit more at ease. I’m sure we’ve all got memories like that, where we saw a watch in the wild and even if it wasn’t anything exciting like a Patek World Time or an fp journe elegante we found ourselves with a major memory of this.
It’s my belief that a great affordable watch puts all its effort into one or two aspects. So that could be the dial, that could be the movement or in the case of the tsuyosa the bracelet. This stand out quality is to capture the buyers that this is the main motivation for. The Tsuyosa bracelet mimics the presidential perfectly, this three link design is comfortable, stylish and bolsters the quality of the piece altogether, afterall the bracelet dominates the side profile and the actual contact point you have with a watch so I think it really ought to be the focus – especially for an integrated bracelet piece. Quite frankly under £1000 I struggle to think of anything as comfortable as this and other than a presidential itself is there really anything that has this vibe. No matter the price point.
See if you can find something like this that brings to you that feeling of joy, of ease in an affordable watch, then that’s the watch you should buy. As when you have this feeling I think you’re able to look past the flaws that you will get with an affordable watch, in fact maybe even embrace them.
With this memory in mind I am able to look past the ugly cyclops, the blurry font on the date wheel and the sort of slab sided case design, as this bracelet makes the flaws easy to love, especially when the overall package can be bought so cheaply.
The Tsuyosa has an RRP of £299, which is still a lot of money. Watches warp your idea of what money is, we all know that. However currently these early 40mm first generation yellow, green, and blue dials are now quite heavily discounted to around £200. £100 off isn’t a major discount in the watch world. But if you think of it as a smidge over 30% off many would be jumping for this, proportionally it is significant. I’d suggest as well that with such heavy discounts retailers are trying to clear the stock of these watches. As far as I’m aware Citizen haven’t officially discontinued these pieces but could they not be long for this world? It might just be so.
However this example that I bought here I got used for about £120. The gentleman I got it from changed his mind on the dial colour, opting for green which based on my time scrolling through Watch Crunch and reddit is arguably the most popular, so while I’d like to say he was wrong and yellow is the way forward. Popular consensus disagrees.
So I guess that leaves us with 1 important question. If you’re in the market for an affordable automatic watch and have some story like mine that connects you to one aspect of this delightful Citizen Tsuyosa, what colour watch are you buying? Let me know below.
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