Beginnings
Ibe was born in 1952, studied mechanical engineering at Sophia University in Tokyo and joined Casio in 1976. In 1981 he wrote a proposal one line long: a rugged watch that would not break even if dropped. Casio says the idea came from a watch his father had given him, which he dropped and smashed on a pavement. He was given a team of three, called Team Tough, and a target they called the triple ten: a fall of ten metres, ten bar of water pressure, ten years on one battery.
What he changed
For two years the team dropped prototypes from the third-floor window of the men’s lavatory at the Casio works, more than two hundred of them, and every one broke. The answer came, in Ibe’s telling, from watching a child bounce a rubber ball: a module floating inside a hollow case, touching it at only a few points, would survive what a rigidly mounted one could not. The DW-5000C went on sale in April 1983, and the G-Shock has since sold more than a hundred million. Ibe went on to the metal MR-G of 1996 and remains the face of the brand.
Why it matters now
The G-Shock made toughness a thing a watch could be famous for, and its floating-module construction is in every shock-resistant watch since.
Worth knowingHis motto, printed on Casio’s own pages, is “never give up”; the two hundred broken prototypes are the reason.
Historian’s noteThe details of the story vary between tellings: a team of three or eight, a second or third floor, which watch was dropped. The rubber-ball moment rests on Ibe’s own account and is given here as such.
SourcesCasio · Nippon.com · Dezeen