TOMY Yes! Gear Yak Time- What time is recess?

My watch today was definitely a mystery when it arrived. One button seemed only to beep, and the other made strange crackling noises. But after finding one site in Japanese, I've finally cracked it :-).

The watch is by TOMY (now Takara Tomy since 2006) who is a Japanese toy, merchandise, and entertainment company founded in 1924 (as Tomiyama but changed to Tomy in 1963).

The secret is that this is a voice recording watch. The top left (largest) button is the one that beeps, and if held, it records for up to 6 seconds. The next button down (which was crackling) is the playback button. It turns out that I had been recording a fraction of a seconds when pressing the record button, so the playback was a short crackle.

The small button at the bottom is the mode button. The modes available are time, alarm, date, and seconds.

The design is also unusual with the LCD display at 30 degrees from horizontal. The watch head can also be removed, and hooked over a button with the orange rubber attachment. The orange hook normally fastens to a green knob on the strap, and as there is one on each strap piece, you can have the strap with the buckle at top or bottom (whichever is your preference). The strap has a jungle-like print including a tiger, butterfly, and frog, and has the word (YaK) in raised letters (- I guess it's yak as in the slang for talking a lot).

It is called the Yak Time watch and is part of the Yes! gear product line, and has the quote "What time is recess?" on the back. It has a copyright from 1996 by Yes! The watch seems to be part of the Yak Bak range from a company called Yes! Entertainment Corporation who are based in California. They started the Yak Bak in 1994 as a simple device with two buttons and a speaker to record and playback messages. Products for Tomy made up 11% of Yes!'s sales in 1996 which seems to be how this model came about. Yes! also released the watch under their own name with Yak time written where the Tomy name is (and Say and Play on the buttons).