W Tanar 35mm f/2.8

Tanaka Kogaku of Kawasaki built its short life in the camera business around Tanack Leica copies and the Tanar screw-mount lenses that served them — and only twice did a Tanar reach beyond the Leica thread. The W Tanar 35mm f/2.8 was the wide-angle of that pair (the Tele-Tanar 13.5cm f/3.5 was the other), and it crossed over twice at once, in near-identical Nikon and Contax dress drawn from a single serial block. A persistent piece of lore holds that there was really only one lens — camera-wiki’s survey of the line says “the same lenses were sold indifferently for both mounts,” the generous depth of field of a 35mm covering the small divergence between the two systems’ focusing helicals — but that sentence is the one claim on the page carrying no source behind it, and what physical evidence exists points the other way. It is a rare lens with a hard deadline built into its story: Tanaka failed in late 1959, and production of everything the company made ended with it.

The lens began as a Leica-screw product, launched in late 1956 at ¥15,800 for Tanaka’s own Tanack cameras, with serial numbers running from 283579 to 284468 — the 2835 prefix encoding the lens itself, 2.8 and 35mm, much as the Tele-Tanar’s 135 echoed its focal length. When the Nikon/Contax version followed is genuinely unknown. A Summer 1957 magazine survey still lists only the screw-mount version, and camera-wiki suggests the shared version was perhaps released later or made for export only; with advertisements running to June 1958 and the bankruptcy closing the window in 1959, a span of roughly 1957–59 is all the evidence supports. Known Nikon/Contax serials run only from 58543 to 58705, a block that falls inside the sequence of the chrome Tanar H.C. 5cm f/2.8 — whether Tanaka duplicated numbers is not known — and neither a domestic price nor a production figure for the version has ever surfaced.

Optically the bayonet lenses are held to be identical to the screw-mount one, and for years the literature could not agree on what that optic was. The figure recorded here — six elements in four groups, a double Gauss — rests on two independent accounts. The first is the table of interchangeable lenses in Shashin Kōgyō for Summer 1957, a manufacturer’s own spec listing, and the same table whose silence about the bayonet version is what dates it. The second is a Japanese repair specialist who stripped screw-mount examples twice, in 2016 and again in 2023; the second time he measured every group with digital calipers during cleaning and traced his own diagram from the measurements, finding groups two and three to be cemented doublets with the third moulded into the rear housing — the kind of detail only a full teardown produces. Against those stands a collector’s first-hand examination reporting a Tessar type, four elements in three groups, which circulated widely enough online that the repair specialist opens his own account by correcting it.

The styling is the two-tone dress of the late Tanars, though the screw-mount and bayonet lenses wear it differently: the screw-mount lens is black on both the focus and aperture rings, with the tip, focus tab and base in chrome, while the bayonet lens blackens the focus ring and lens tip and leaves the aperture ring and base mount in chrome — dropping the focus tab and reversing the focus direction to match the ergonomics of Nikon’s and Zeiss’s own lenses. A chrome-plated version is reported to have preceded that finish. Both frame through an external black-and-chrome finder marked TANACK 35mm, and one small engraving quirk sets the 35mm lenses apart within the Tanar line: they are marked in millimetres where nearly every other Tanar reads in centimetres.

The lens also had a second identity, and it is what makes the one-lens-or-two question answerable. Soligor — the export brand under which small Japanese makers pooled their products — sold a 35mm f/2.8 for the same bayonet cameras that is essentially this lens renamed, nothing altered but the nameplate, its serial numbers continuing the same 58xxx block with a T appended. In 2024 a collector put a “C”-engraved Soligor on a Nikon SP and found it would not mount, though it seated without complaint on a Contax IIa and a Bessa R2C. A Nikon-engraved Soligor has since been photographed as well — serial 58838, an N on the mount ring — so both letters are now accounted for on the rebadged lens. If the Soligor is this lens under another name, then the Nikon and Contax barrels are not interchangeable, whatever the trade press implied; the repair specialist’s teardown independently reports the two as different barrel designs carrying an N or a C ahead of the mount lock. A Nikon-mount Tanar brought €360 at Westlicht in 2006, and for a maker that lasted barely seven years in the camera trade, the little wide-angle proved unusually good at outliving its own name.