This is the last limited edition F.P. Journe will make. The Chronographe FB was presented in Tokyo in May 2024 to mark twenty years of the first boutique the brand ever opened, in a run of two hundred pieces, and the house has said there will be no more limited series of any kind. It follows the Tokyo anniversary template exactly: a 40 mm polished titanium case, crown and pushers in 18K 6N gold, and a ruthenium-coated guilloche silver dial with sapphire counters. A burgundy alligator strap on a gold clasp completes it. Underneath is a flyback chronograph. It is also the only flyback the brand has put into a boutique series.
The palette was fixed in 2005 and has not moved since. Polished titanium reads gray and hard against 6N gold, which is warm and pink, and the ruthenium dial sits between the two, shifting brown and blue as the light changes. The center of the dial is worked in a Clous de Paris pattern beneath the coating. Three elements interrupt it: a sixty second counter at nine, a sixty minute counter at three, both cut in sapphire so the mechanism shows through, and a big date at six. Hands are gilt in 5N gold, with red lacquer on the chronograph hand and ivory elsewhere. The case measures 40 mm across and a little over ten millimeters deep. Two pushers flank the crown, which is a departure from the Centigraphe and appropriate here, since this is a different chronograph entirely. Sapphire counters are the detail that carries across from the earlier anniversary watches and the one that gives the dial its depth, since the eye passes through them into the mechanism rather than stopping at a printed surface. The big date at six is unusual on a chronograph, where the space is normally given to a third register, and it is the clearest sign that this watch was drawn for legibility rather than for symmetry. Gold pushers against a titanium band are the other signature of the series.
The movement is the 1518.2, hand wound, and it descends from the chronograph Journe introduced in 2018. Its distinguishing feature is the flyback: pressing the reset while the chronograph is running returns the hand to zero and starts it again in the same motion, without stopping first, which is the arrangement pilots and navigators asked for when successive intervals had to be timed without gaps. The chronograph seconds hand runs from the center and takes two minutes for a full revolution rather than one, which doubles the resolution a wearer can read off the scale. The pusher at two starts and stops, the pusher at four resets and executes the flyback. Winding, date correction and time setting are all handled by the crown in three positions. A flyback is a more useful complication than it sounds and a harder one to build than a standard chronograph, since the reset has to disengage, zero and re-engage the hand in a single movement without damaging the wheel it acts on. Most makers who offer one have licensed or adapted an existing design. Journe built his own, and the two minute revolution of the central hand is a detail that follows from it, since a hand moving half as fast can be read to a finer division against the same printed scale. The two counters keep the running total while it does.
The Tokyo Boutique Anniversaire series runs back two decades. Journe opened his first boutique in Aoyama in September 2003, inside a Tadao Ando building in Omotesando, at a time when independent makers sold through retailers and nothing else, and the anniversary editions began in 2005 with a Chronometre Souverain in twenty pieces. A Resonance followed in 2006 in twelve, a Tourbillon in 2007 in twenty, an Octa Perpetuelle in 2009 in ninety-nine, and a Centigraphe in 2016 in eighty across all the boutiques. Two hundred pieces makes the FB the largest of them by a considerable margin, which is a reasonable answer to twenty years of demand and to the fact that it closes the sequence. The boutique itself is worth a sentence, since it explains why Tokyo rather than Geneva or Paris carries the series. In 2003 an independent watchmaker opening a shop under his own name was close to unheard of, and doing it first in Japan rather than in Switzerland was stranger still. It worked, and eleven more boutiques followed. The anniversary editions were conceived as a way of thanking the clients of those shops rather than as a commercial exercise, which is why they have always been small, always titanium and gold, and never advertised outside the boutique network. Two hundred is still a small number by any other maker's standard.
Two things make this watch difficult to obtain and neither is the size of the run. It was sold only through the boutiques to established clients, and it is the final limited edition the brand intends to produce, which has attached a significance to it that a flyback chronograph would not otherwise carry. The watch itself is straightforward: a well proportioned 40 mm chronograph with a legible dial, a useful complication and the warmest color combination the house uses. As a recent limited series the questions are numbering, papers and the original strap and clasp, since the gold clasp is specific to the edition and not easily replaced. Numbering runs from one to two hundred and is engraved on the case, which is the first thing to establish on any example offered. Beyond that the watch behaves like any hand wound chronograph: it needs winding daily, the date wants correcting at the end of the shorter months, and the flyback is best exercised rather than left alone.
