Komura 135mm f/3.5

When Sankyo Koki brought its Komura brand to the Nikon rangefinder in the late 1950s, the 135mm f/3.5 was one of the initial four lenses in the line — alongside the 35mm f/2.8, 80mm f/1.8 and 105mm f/2.8 — and the budget grade of a 135mm range that climbed through f/2.8 and f/2.5 all the way to an f/2. Finished in black with a chrome nose and chrome mount, it gave Nikon S shooters a third-party counterpart to Nippon Kogaku’s own Nikkor-Q 13.5cm f/3.5, from a maker whose reputation rested on selling sharp lenses cheaply. No production figure was ever published, no S-mount price list survives, and the Nikon version was never even directly dated — the third-party record simply runs thinner than Nikon’s own — but examples in Nikon mount still surface on the Japanese market and on eBay.

Sankyo Koki was founded in 1951 and adopted the Komura name in 1955 — by Japanese accounts a fusion of the surnames of president Mitsuru Kojima (小島満) and managing director Inamura (稲村). The firm built its reputation on sharp, inexpensive lenses for other makers’ cameras, particularly liked in commercial and advertising work, and its rangefinder-era catalog ran in Leica screw mount and, briefly, Nikon S — Nikon versions conventionally wore an “N” on the barrel, though no such marking (and no bundled finder) is documented for the 135mm f/3.5, unlike its 35mm and 80mm siblings. The company later followed the market into SLR glass — the five-element Super-Komura and Komuranon 135s are different, later designs that share nothing but the focal length — renamed itself Komura Lens MFG. in 1969, and ceased operations in 1980.

What dating exists belongs to the Leica-mount lens: a first version in 1955, sold until 1957, and a second version that year with black-painted aperture and focus rings. The S-mount lens was among the initial four but was never directly dated, so a late-1950s window is all the record supports. Its optics are similarly half-documented. A first-hand Japanese review of the 1955 screw-mount lens supports a four-element, three-group tele-Sonnar; lens-db’s reading of the 1963 Komura brochure — a three-element triplet — has never been confirmable; and Japanese reviewers shooting the late screw-mount type describe an uncemented four-element construction in the original 1923 Ernostar pattern, one of them assigning a triplet to the earliest production. What sat behind the chrome nose of the Nikon-mount lens specifically was never explicitly recorded anywhere.

The barrels do carry one useful signal, though it is not one the literature mentions. Photographed screw-mount examples split cleanly by their engraving: the earlier lenses read 135m.m. f:3.5 with the maker given as Sankyo Kōki Tokyo, the later ones f=135mm 1:3.5 with Sankyo Kōki Japan. The same pair of styles, in the same order, turns up on the Komura 105mm f/2.8. No source consulted records the pattern, and put it forward as an observation drawn from comparing examples while building this catalogue rather than as an established fact — but if it holds across the line, the bezel dates a Komura at a glance, and it would go some way toward ordering a family whose serial record is otherwise thin.

On modern mirrorless bodies the screw-mount lenses have earned the 135/3.5 a quiet reappraisal in Japan. Reviewers report an unusually luxurious build for a budget lens — brass barrels and a sixteen-blade aperture on documented examples — and two distinct characters: early lenses render with a gentle glow, big melting bokeh and the occasional rainbow ghost, while the lighter late type snaps sharp with vivid color once stopped down. The busy, painterly background blur, once dismissed as ugly and now prized as texture, is exactly the sort of transitional-design signature that has turned the humble Komura into a “hidden gem” of the Japanese old-lens scene — and the Nikon-mount version is its least-documented form.