About three years ago, watches changed. A new breed of Japanese designers decided to get rid of hands, faces and numbers and replace them with flashing grids of LED lights.

Yasushi Kimura is the man to blame. His Pimp 1 is a matrix of 72 LEDs which you can just about use to tell the time – if you’ve read the instruction manual.

The success of the Pimp encouraged Kimura really to experiment. He produced Scope , with a Battleships-style grid, and Equaliser , which has a widescreen display described by one blog as “reasonably easy to read”. Most recently, JLR7 is a neat grid of blue right angles – it looks slick, but there’s really no clue how it might tell the time.

Kimura got interested in watch-making while living in London in the Nineties. It takes about ten minutes to teach someone how to read the time on one of his creations. Kimura now wants to lose the LEDs and get back to designing analog watches – but without any hands.

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