Description
Ask most people to picture a G-Shock and they will describe a hundred-dollar slab of armoured resin. Since 1996, however, Casio has also run MR-G: a made-in-Japan flagship built to prove that the toughest name in watchmaking can compete on craft as well as survival. That line turns thirty this year, and Casio has marked the anniversary not with a new complication but with the most craft-led watch it has ever shipped — the MRG-B2100HR-1A, limited to 800 pieces at ¥1,100,000, roughly USD 7,000.
The watch takes the fully analogue MRG-B2100 — the titanium "CasiOak" that most collectors consider the peak of the family — and hands its dial to Hiroto Rakusho, a Nishijin-born metal-leaf artist certified by the Japanese government as a Master of Traditional Crafts. Rakusho created an original artwork titled Haruka, meaning eternity, for the anniversary, then applied it by hand to every single example. The dial's raised lattice, modelled on kigumi joinery — the Japanese woodworking method that joins timber without nails or metal fittings — carries powdered platinum leaf laid on by Rakusho personally. No two dials are alike.
It arrives in November 2026, with US pricing still to be confirmed. A gold-leaf sibling, the MRG-B2100HS-9A, was announced alongside it in a tighter run of 150 pieces.
Design
The two halves of this watch arrive at the same result from opposite ends of the technology spectrum, and that tension is the whole design. The dial is hand-craft: powdered platinum leaf on a dimensional lattice, producing gradations of light and shadow that give each piece a distinct character no assembly line could reproduce. The bezel and bracelet are pure engineering: there is no pigment anywhere on the watch. An ultrashort-pulse laser cuts micron-level textures into the metal so that it refracts light the way a butterfly's wing or a mineral does — structural colour — and the surface drifts between blue, green and coppery pink as the wrist moves.
Underneath the artwork, the hardware is unreconstructed MR-G. The octagonal bezel is assembled from 27 separate components, each polished before assembly, and formed in COBARION, a cobalt-chromium alloy roughly four times harder than pure titanium with a platinum-like gleam. The bracelet is DAT55G, a super-hard titanium alloy; the case is Ti64 titanium; and the whole exterior is DLC-coated against scratches. A sapphire crystal with anti-reflective treatment covers the dial. At 44.4 mm across and 122 grams, it is a large watch that is not a heavy one.
Specifications
- Reference: MRG-B2100HR-1A
- Case diameter: 44.4 mm
- Case thickness: 13.6 mm
- Lug-to-lug: 49.5 mm
- Case material: Ti64 titanium with DLC coating
- Bezel: 27 components, COBARION cobalt-chromium alloy, structural-colour laser texturing
- Crystal: Sapphire with anti-reflective coating
- Caseback: Screw-down titanium
- Water resistance: 200 m
- Dial: Dimensional kigumi-inspired latticework finished in hand-applied platinum leaf
- Movement: Casio Tough Solar quartz module
- Complications: Multi-Band 6 radio time sync, Bluetooth smartphone link, world time, shock resistance
- Winding: Solar charging
- Bracelet: DAT55G super-hard titanium alloy
- Weight: 122 g
- Limited edition: 800 pieces, individually serialised
- Price: ¥1,100,000 (approximately USD 7,000); US pricing to be announced
- Availability: November 2026
What's Exciting
Choosing a craftsman's hands over a new module for a thirtieth anniversary tells you what Casio thinks MR-G has actually been for. There is no added function here — the movement is the same Tough Solar quartz you get in a standard MRG-B2100 — and that is the point. Every yen of the difference between this and the regular titanium model went into surface: 800 dials individually leafed by one man, and a bezel coloured by laser interference rather than paint. Those two ideas sit in deliberate opposition, tradition and cutting-edge process making the same argument about metal and light, and they resolve into something far more coherent than most anniversary pieces manage.
The honest caveat is the value question. Seven thousand dollars is Grand Seiko territory and well past a titanium Tudor, for a quartz watch. But that comparison misreads what is being sold. Nobody buys an MR-G for the movement; they buy it for the COBARION bezel, the 27-part assembly, the finishing that Casio's Yamagata plant can do and almost nobody else attempts at this scale. This is the most extreme version of that proposition Casio has ever offered, and it is the rare G-Shock whose price is defended by craft rather than by materials science alone.
History
MR-G began in 1996 with the MRG-100, born from a question that sounded contradictory: could shock resistance survive the move from resin to full metal? Kikuo Ibe — the engineer behind the original G-Shock — and a small team solved it by separating the exterior components from the case and cushioning the gap between them, the architecture every MR-G has used since. Titanium entered the line almost immediately with the MRG-120T and has been a fixture ever since, and over three decades MR-G has functioned as Casio's materials and technology laboratory, where COBARION, DAT55G, DLC and the brand's most ambitious finishing techniques are tried before anything else.
The MRG-B2100 platform itself is a more recent arrival: the octagonal "CasiOak" silhouette that made the resin GA-2100 a phenomenon, executed in metal at the top of the range. The MRG-B2100HR-1A is the first time Casio has handed that platform to an outside artist, and it lands exactly thirty years after the MRG-100 proved the concept was possible at all.
