Goro Yoshida

Born in Hiroshima in 1900, Goro Yoshida left middle school early and apprenticed with a Tokyo firm that repaired and modified motion-picture cameras and projectors. Trips to Shanghai to buy parts in the late 1920s convinced him Japan could make its own precision cameras.

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.