This is a repost of a blog entry that I posted on my Windows Live blog on June 2008.  It features a custom Seiko watch that was issued to commemorate Singapore’s 34th National Day in 1999.

Recently, a reader, Glenn was given the same watch by his buddy. While searching for information of the watch on the Internet, he stumbled upon my post and contacted me.

I feel this post should be put here for proper archiving since it is the only National Day commemorative Seiko watch that I know of.

Once again, let’s take a look at this National Day Commemorative Seiko from 1999.

This watch has a very odd shape and does not have the Seiko name on its dial. I guess the Seiko name was omitted because the designer wanted the dial to show only the National Day logo and theme of that year.

Logo
One of the main celebration events of the National Day is the National Day Parade (NDP) and since 1998, a unique logo was designed for each year’s NDP. The logo printed on the dial was the logo for NDP 1999.

Theme
National Day’99 was the last parade for us in the 20th century and before we marched into the new millennium, the government unveiled its vision for Singapore in the 21st century known as the “Singapore 21 Vision”. It consists of the five ideas below:

• Strong Families : Our Foundation and Our Future
• Every Singaporean Matters
• Opportunities for All
• The Singapore Heartbeat
• An Active Citizen : Making a Difference to Society

These ideas were weaved into the National Day theme of that year -“Together, We Make The Difference”.

Below is the caseback of the watch. It is a S-Wave model powered by the 7S26 movement. There is no info on how many pieces were made but I believe it was made to order for a certain organization, to be handed out to its employees during their National Day celebration.

The organization probably approached Thong Sia to make the watch. A few existing Seiko models were shown to them and they picked this particular S-Wave model. Next, the Seiko factory made the custom dials and shipped the S-Wave watches with the custom dial.

The watch was made in June 1999 which was about two months before that year’s National Day.

Signed crown

Below are the some pictures taken by Glenn.

Here’s what a regular version of the S-Wave model looks like:

Photo credit: PMWF

From what I heard, the commemorative watch came with a rubber strap like the one show below.

And here’s the old post on my Windows Live blog.
http://yeomanseiko.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!3318BA07329CD633!1501.entry