He clicks his stop watch after an event that leads to the climax of the current events. For example, his watch has not stopped running during Utena's duel with Akio, because the true climax is when Anthy stabs Utena, and not the duel itself. He startles Nanami by clicking his stop watch in episode 8 as she watches her minions harass Anthy, because it's this ill behavior towards Anthy that was the cause of all of this. In other words, he keeps track of events leading to the revolution.

If you look at the numbers on his stop watch, a lot of the time, episode numbers with some relation to the plot show up. Anything above 39 is beyond the revolution.

In the commentary on the very last episode, Ikuhara says something about the numbers being the timing of the last thing a character said, or the last dialog exchange, or something along those lines.  That doesn't answer any of the bigger questions, of course.

Everybody in SKU has their quirks and fascinations. Miki's most glaring one just happens to be the stopwatch. While it does come in handy for his role in the Student Council (if memory serves me right, he's the secretary and thus the minutes-taker for each session), it may also be a source of familiarity and peace to him. Everybody's got that one thing in their lives they can rely on, and for Miki, it can't be the piano (he's always saying that he can never get "Sunlit Garden" just right) and it can't be Kozue (because like all SKU characters, she's a dynamic being, not a static one). So the stopwatch it is.

As to why he's so obssessive-compulsive about timing anything other than a Seitokai meeting, and what the numbers truly mean, you'd have to ask Kunihiko "Ikuni" Ikuhara about that, and he's famous for not giving you a straight answer...or giving you the real answer behind some piece of symbolism in the series, but it's so simplistic and seemingly meaningless that you think he's just pulling your leg...

Until then, we debate symbolism until the very shores of the End of Time and beyond!

(Also, Charuru? Good plug for that fic. I've read it and I highly recommend it to anybody who likes symbolism, crackfic and doesn't mind a good jab or two at Miki if he's their favourite character.)

brian: It may symbolize his obsession, which is shared by others, for manipulating time

I admit, I always figured it was this - that Miki wanted to stop time and be in the sunlit garden forever, as being representative of having a good relationship with his twin.

But...

I think Razara's explanation is epic win!

thanks for answers
but last Q no one answers....

is there any other think? or can't understnad what i mean.....

i wanna answer why the elder boy(nanami's) get the stopwatch from Miki at last sceen..

1. Like many prodigies, he is has a form of OCD.
2.This keeps his mind preoccupied, and helps him listen.
3. He is minute taker
4. There is a symbolic message somewhere...like Razaara and BioKraze stated.
5. Maybe he just fucking feels like having a stopwatch!

Wow! You may well have peeked into Ikuhara's mind!

OMGOMGOMGOMG:dance:

I think his stopwatch is because he's secretary of the Student Council. I saw him clicking and then writing. Perhaps he uses the stopwatch to time the meetings? Because obviously there is no watch on the balcony.
Maybe he took this clicking into his everyday life?

When I first began watching Utena, someone told me that Miki is constantly timing conversations and actions of the people in his world. They had a theory that time did not flow properly, and Miki was on to this. Because we are watching this story through the eyes of the characters who experience, we don't realize it.
I am also of the mindset that Miki's watch identifies key moments. When shit goes down during the final duel, Miki is looking at his watch.
Of course this was a theory that they had. I haven't given it much thought till now. Thought I'd throw it out there.

Crossposted from the Tasty Treats thread:

Yasha wrote:

gumi wrote:

Q – What does Miki measure with his stopwatch? (reader from Hokkaido)
Ikuhara – Let’s just say that it’s connected with the structure of the world.

Ikuhara gives various answers about the stopwatch. Many of them are true. The stopwatch is a symbol, though I don’t believe it’s as esoteric as timed lines. Your mods may have solved the mystery, but I need to go back and verify some things before we can comment. It will probably be an essay.

For a very, very quick summary of what we think about it, the watch is symbolic of the thing that Miki and Tsuwabuki have in common-- impatience to grow up and be an adult. I have to go back and note down what is going on when the stopwatch clicks, and find all of the references Ikuhara has made to it, but we think what we're going to find is that the stopwatch is Miki's way of controlling his impatience for things to happen-- instead of dwelling on how long it's taking for something to happen, he times it.

Clarice wrote:

CausalityStar wrote:

I think it was a gift from Ianto Jones and/or Jack Harkness.

Oh, god, now all I can hear is Górecki. ...not that this is a bad thing, considering how much I love the song, but I didn't much care for the way they used it in that episode...

Hmm, Miki's stopwatch. I like the way Ikuhara put it, actually, even though we all know he's got a tendency towards being A MASSIVE BASTARD. But with that said, I've always seen it as a form of control. What he's controlling, I've never really considered; Miki's never interested me much as a character. But I think Yasha's idea, of it having something to do with growing up, is interesting. Although I never really got that impression from Miki...that he wants to grow up, exactly. To me he's always represented something that's trying to stay between two worlds; he's a thirteen year old taking college classes, for crying out loud. He wants some of the benefits of the adult world, but in other ways he wants to cling to his shining thing and stay in the sunny garden of his "idyllic" childhood. In that way, the watch is his control switch; he lets time go on as far as he wants it to, and then he stops it dead where it suits him. Because anything more would be too much.

I was oversimplifying because I didn't want it to turn into an essay when I still have to verify half of the facts. It's not exactly 'growing up' that Miki wants so much as having the choice and the power not to grow up if he wants. But to have that choice and power, he has to grow up, or at least he feels that he does. He feels like he has to lose what he wants most in order to have the power to get it for himself, which is the source of his problems later on in the series. Both Tsuwabuki and Miki don't necessarily want to be adults so much as they want to have the power and privilege that adults have. In Miki's case, however, this can be affected by the events around him-- it can happen that he obtains power through the things that happen, power enough to give him what he wants without becoming an adult. He has a chance to obtain that power without having to lose the thing he's looking for.

The stopwatch is by nature a representation of passing time, something important to both Miki and Tsuwabuki, because as time passes, they grow closer to having what they want. In Miki's case, however, it also takes him further away from it. This is why it's not so much that it's timing him until he becomes an adult as it is timing his impatience for things to happen; the movement from childhood toward adulthood can't be stopped, but the time it takes until he has power can, since it's not a fixed progression (Spira Mirabilis, anyone? ). This is close to Tsuwabuki's desire to grow up (as I said, it's not so much that they want to be adults as that they want to have the power/privilege adults have), thus, at the end Miki teaches Tsuwabuki to use the thing that kept his own impatience under control for so long-- the stopwatch.

Bleah. I hope that made sense. It's still simplified but at least more accurate this time.

I promise you, it will be more fleshed out and have things like, oh, I dunno, evidence (!) when I write it.

But it's gonna take a while. I have a few other things on my list ahead of it right now... and I'm making nice progress on them, for once.