Who Founded Canon?

Takeshi Mitarai supported the camera laboratory that Goro Yoshida, Saburo Uchida and Takeo Maeda opened in 1933, and became president of its successor, Precision Optical Industry, Co., Ltd., in 1942. After the war he restarted camera production; the company became Canon Camera Co. in 1947, listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 1949, and opened a New York branch in 1955 and Canon Europa in Geneva in 1957. He led Canon as president until 1974. His nephew Fujio Mitarai joined the company in 1961 and is its Chairman and CEO today. Takeshi Mitarai was born in 1901.

Yoshida took apart a Leica Model II and, as he later recalled, was angered to find it was built from brass, aluminium, iron and rubber yet sold for 420 yen. In November 1933 he set up the Precision Optical Instruments Laboratory in a Roppongi apartment with his brother-in-law Saburo Uchida and Takeo Maeda. He built the Kwanon prototype in 1934, naming it after the Buddhist goddess of mercy and its lens Kasyapa after a disciple of the Buddha. He left the laboratory in the autumn of 1934 over the direction of its camera work, before the first commercial model, the Hansa Canon, went on sale in 1936. He died in 1993. Goro Yoshida was born in 1900.

Saburo Uchida (1899-1982) co-founded the Precision Optical Instruments Laboratory with Goro Yoshida, his brother-in-law, and Takeo Maeda in November 1933. When the lab could not make its own lenses or rangefinders, Uchida's connections solved the problem: his brother Ryonosuke had been an auditor at Nippon Kogaku, which led to an introduction to its executive vice president Toyotaro Hori. The resulting agreement had Nippon Kogaku supply the Nikkor lens, lens mount, viewfinder optics and rangefinder for the Hansa Canon of 1936, while the lab built the body and focal-plane shutter. (Exact birth year remains publicly undisclosed).

Takeo Maeda (1909-1977) was the youngest of the founding group. A former subordinate of Saburo Uchida, he joined Uchida and Goro Yoshida in opening the Precision Optical Instruments Laboratory in Roppongi in November 1933 and worked on the Kwanon prototype and the Hansa Canon that followed in 1936. Canon counts him among the four founders of the company incorporated as Precision Optical Industry, Co., Ltd. in 1937. (Exact birth year remains publicly undisclosed).