Kikuza Japanese Watch Face

About Kikuza Japanese Watch Face

WabiFace Kikuza brings the gold leaf and painted pine of a Japanese screen panel to your Wear OS smartwatch.

🌲 A GOLD-GROUND PINE PANEL
Kinji shohekiga is the painting of Japan's great halls: sheets of gold leaf laid edge to edge over cedar boards, and over the gold a single subject drawn large — here an old pine in malachite green and ink, its bole crossing the panel and its branches closing in from the corners. The leaf has been rubbed back to bare timber round the edge and along the seams, and every bit of that wear is kept. Four kikuza are set into it at the diagonals: the chrysanthemum-petal seats in brass that ride under a nail head on temple joinery, each a ring of raised petals round a sunk, dark dish. This dial is that panel, kept whole.

✨ THE RUNNING LIGHT
A highlight travels the outer band of the panel, one full lap every minute. It tells you the seconds the way raking light tells you where a gilded surface is turned, and it can be switched off for a still dial.

⌚ FOUR KIKUZA
Each of the four dishes holds a complication, and every one of them is ring-capable: give a dish a data source that reports a goal and it draws a progress ring around the value. Battery does this out of the box; assign a step goal or an exercise ring and those fill too.

🕐 THE TIME
Between the upper pair of fittings and the lower pair the pine opens completely and leaves a wide field of plain leaf across the middle, so the hour and minute take all of it — a very large reading with nothing behind it to compete with.

📅 THE CALENDAR
Month and day together, then the weekday, then the seconds, on one line beneath the hour. The calendar and the seconds can each be turned off.

🎨 FOUR LEAVES
Kin (gold), Aokin (green gold), Akagane (red gold) and Gin (silver) — four kinds of leaf a workshop actually beat and laid. Only the leaf changes: the pine, the bole, the bare timber and the four brass fittings stay exactly as they were painted, and where the leaf is rubbed thin the change fades away with it, which is what a rubbed panel does.

🖌 THREE PIGMENTS
Sumi (ink black), Gunjo (azurite blue) and Bengara (iron red) — the pigments this kind of panel was painted with. Each carries two tones and both are used on the dial: the deep one writes on the gold, the pale one writes inside the dark dishes and again in always-on. One choice moves the time, the calendar, the seconds, the complication text and the goal rings together, the way a single painter would have ground them all.

🌙 AMBIENT MODE
The panel falls away and the four kikuza stay as thin lit rings inside the circle of the edge, with the hour redrawn above them, so the piece is still recognisable at a glance while the display is dimmed.

🎴 DETAILS
- A gold-leaf panel kept at full resolution, board seams and rubbed leaf included
- An old pine in malachite green and ink, drawn across the whole panel
- Four brass chrysanthemum seats, each a complication that can carry a goal ring
- An outer band of worn leaf that the running light travels

🎴 MORE FROM WABIFACE
Kyoto, our free Japanese watch face: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=jp.wabiface.kyoto

🌸 ABOUT WABIFACE
WabiFace is a collection of watch faces celebrating Japanese aesthetics — wabi-sabi, mono no aware, and the dignified passage of time.

Requires Wear OS 5 or later. Compatible with Pixel Watch, Galaxy Watch, and other Wear OS 5+ smartwatches.

Artwork created with AI assistance and reviewed by the developer.

Please check your watch OS version before purchasing.

For support: [email protected]
Website: https://wabiface.jp