The development of the watch market in Meiji era Japan (1868 – 1912) embodies the double modernization process, made of industrialization and acculturation which occurred during the second part of the nineteenth century. At first, throughout the 1870s and the 1880s, it was structured as a niche market controlled by a few Swiss importers who had settled at Yokohama. Watches were luxury goods which were collected rather than really used. Secondly, since the middle of the 1890s, an important shift took place and led to a mass consumer market. The expansion of railways, urbanization and modernization of lifestyle turned watches into a useful and even necessary, object. In order to fulfill the needs of consumers, new European trading companies introduced cheap watches into Japan. As for Japanese dealers, they began to import directly mass produced watches from the West and, above all, to establish a domestic watches industry.