How we review

What we choose to cover

TOKI covers Japanese watches — Seiko, Grand Seiko, Citizen, Casio and G-Shock, Orient, Credor, Minase and the independents — with a focus on what is hard to see from outside Japan: JDM-exclusive releases, Japanese-language primary sources, and model-code references. We pick what to write about editorially: relevance to that mission, reader questions, and reference value. Vendors and affiliate programs have no say in what we cover or what we conclude.

Worn vs spec-based — we always tell you which

Wearing a watch and reading its specification sheet are different kinds of knowledge, and we refuse to blur them. Every reference, product and guide on this site carries a marker at the top, in one of these two words:

• Worn — we, or a named contributor, actually had the watch on the wrist. Comfort, legibility and wear impressions may only appear on a page marked this way.
• Spec-based — built from official specs, manuals and primary sources, without wrist time. It will not tell you how the watch feels, because we would not know.

Today, all 23 pages published here are marked spec-based. We do not run a worn-review programme: no one at TOKI is sent watches to wear, so no page claims wrist time. If that ever changes, the pages it changes for will say "worn" and name who wore it — and the rest will keep saying what they are.

We will not describe wrist time we did not have in order to make a page sound more authoritative. If that means a reference page reads drier than a magazine review, it reads drier.

Facts, prices and dates

Specifications cite official primary sources. Forum hearsay does not become a spec here — if we cannot source a number, the page does not carry that number.

We do not publish a price without the date we checked it. If we cannot date it, we do not print a figure at all — we link to the seller instead. Nothing on this site is a live quote: this site is cached, prices move within the hour, and the retailer’s own page is always the current truth. For the same reason we will not tell you a watch is in stock; at most we tell you what a seller’s listing showed on a stated day. Release dates come from official announcements and can move.

Affiliate links, plainly

We earn no commission on anything on this site. TOKI holds no affiliate accounts, so every outbound retailer link is a plain link to that shop and we are paid nothing if you use it — no vendor pays to be listed, ranked or described. Links still carry rel="sponsored". This sentence is not a promise we maintain by hand: it is generated from the same registry that adds affiliate parameters to links, so the day we join a programme this page, the shelf and the disclosure above every buy box change together — or not at all. Details are in the disclaimer.

The lines we never cross

• We never give investment advice. Watches here are objects to wear and enjoy, not assets. We do not write about watches as investments and we do not predict prices.
• We never issue authenticity verdicts. We may explain publicly documented characteristics of a model, but "is mine genuine?" belongs with the manufacturer or a professional authentication service.
• We never fabricate ratings. You will not see star scores or aggregate ratings here until there is a real, documented review program behind them.
• We never let a vendor buy a conclusion. No paid placements inside editorial verdicts; sponsored content, if it ever exists, will be labeled as such.

Corrections

When we get something wrong we fix the page, and for anything material we say on the page that we changed it, rather than editing quietly. A correction never gets buried because it is embarrassing.