On 14 November 1954 the Nakano Times, the local paper of a ward in western Tokyo, ran a profile of a neighbourhood business. The headline was “人の眼より明るいレンズ” — a lens brighter than the human eye — and the business was Teikoku Kōgaku Kōgyō K.K., the company of Suzuki Sakuta (鈴木作太), which the headline called world-famous for the Zunow F1.1. To show what the lens could do, the paper printed a line of ice-show performers photographed with it wide open at 1/500 of a second. Seven years later Canon would sell its f/0.95 as “four times faster than the human eye”.
For a few years in the middle of the 1950s this small works in Nakano was ahead of Nippon Kōgaku, Canon and Fuji at the one number every Japanese lens maker was chasing. How the four companies raced each other to the widest aperture is told in One tenth of a stop. This story is about the company itself: where it came from, what it made besides the famous lens, the reflex camera it built ahead of its time, and why it was gone by 1961. Much of it rests on one book, Hagiya’s Zunō kamera tanjō (1999), as Camera-wiki and Japanese Wikipedia cite it, and on the memories of the founder’s son. Where the record is thin, this story says so.
A grinding shop and a navy man, to 1945
The company began as the Teikoku Kōgaku Kenkyūjo (帝国光学研究所), the Imperial Optical Research Institute. Its founder was Suzuki Sakuta. The histories say almost nothing else about him: not his birth, not his training, not his death. The founding year is disputed. Hagiya gives 1930; Hattori, writing in Kurashikku Kamera Senka no.30, gives 1940, and Camera-wiki suspects that 1930 is a misprint. Suzuki’s son says only that the firm “had made lenses since before the war”, which fits either. oldlens.com puts it in Yamato-chō, in Nakano ward, and the 1954 newspaper profiled it as a Nakano firm.
It did not begin as a maker of finished lenses. Camera-wiki, following Hagiya, describes a lens-grinding shop working as a subcontractor for other companies, which also made military material before and during the war. The change came in 1941, when Hamano Michisaburō (浜野道三郎), a lens designer from Nippon Kōgaku, joined it. Japanese Wikipedia’s timeline puts his arrival in the founding year, as technical director, but that line merges two facts; Hagiya has him joining in 1941. Hamano’s former employer had itself been put together in 1917 from three firms to make optical instruments, rangefinders among them, in Japan, and through the 1930s it made optics for the armed forces.
In 1943 the Imperial Navy asked the company for a lens. On that much the sources agree. They disagree about what it was for. Japanese Wikipedia and oldlens.com say it was a 50mm lens at f/1.1 for aerial search at dawn and dusk, when there was barely light to see by. Suzuki’s son, interviewed in 2006, remembered it differently: the navy wanted a bright lens for a bombsight, and the wartime work reached f/1.2 at a time, he said, when f/2 was normal and even the Germans stopped at f/1.4. Hagiya and Hattori, by Camera-wiki’s account, record a third use: an f/1.2 lens tried in 1945 for X-ray photography, and perhaps another fast lens for infrared work.
The X-ray lens makes sense in its time. During the war the army and navy pushed mass screening for tuberculosis by indirect X-ray photography, which photographs the image on a fluorescent screen and needs a very fast lens to do it. oldlens.com says imports of the Zeiss Sonnar 5cm f/1.5, the lens the work had started with, ran short, and the government ordered fast lenses from Japanese makers. Whatever the navy’s purpose, none of these lenses survives. The factory was destroyed in the last months of the war, and with it, as later writers repeat, whatever the company had made and written down.
Revival and a name, 1948–1953
The firm came back under its old name in 1948, to make fast lenses for cameras. Hagiya, via Camera-wiki, has the first prototypes finished in 1950, and Japanese Wikipedia says the 1950 prototype had twelve elements. What its aperture was is less clear. The earliest appearance of the name in print that has been found is on an f/1.2.
In September 1951 Sakurai Minoru wrote a buyer’s guide to Japanese high-end cameras for the magazine Photo Art. In passing he mentioned a camera called the Teica, from a Teikoku Kōgaku “entirely unknown to ordinary amateurs”, which was a close copy of the Leica III (his “DIII”). Its lens, he wrote, was “designed by Mr Hamano, formerly an engineer at Nippon Kōgaku”, and was called ズノウ, Zunow: a 50mm f/1.2, “twice the brightness of f/1.5”, with an f/1 said to be coming. Sakurai worried that a lens that large would block the Leica’s viewfinder. No Teica survives, and it was almost certainly a prototype. But the notice fixes three things: the name was in use by 1951, Hamano was credited with the design, and the lens on show that year was an f/1.2, not yet an f/1.1.
There is a legend attached to these years. oldlens.com says that Suzuki and Hamano “are said to have made fifty thousand design drawings” and that the lens took ten years. The words “are said to” are the site’s own, and the line is best read as the way the company’s story came to be told. The ten years do at least match the span from the navy’s request in 1943 to the announcement in 1953.
The name has two explanations. The usual one is that Zunow is 頭脳, zunō, the Japanese word for brain, and Camera-wiki gives it with a “possibly”. The founder’s son gave a longer version in 2006. His father, he said, believed he was descended from the warrior Hata Rokurōzaemon Tokiyoshi (畑時能), and read the given name 時能 as “Jinō”. From Jinō he came to Zunō. The son adds that the warrior’s name is properly read Tokiyoshi, and the interview places him in the Sengoku period, though Hata Tokiyoshi belongs to the fourteenth-century wars between the Northern and Southern Courts. It is a family story, and the only account of the name from inside the family.
On 20 October 1953 the company announced the Zunow 5cm f/1.1: nine elements in five groups. Nikon’s own history of its lenses, written by its designers, concedes the point plainly: among lenses faster than f/1.2, the Zunow of 1953 came first and Nikon’s own came second.
The famous lens, 1953–1956
The Zunow 5cm f/1.1 was a Sonnar pushed nearly a full stop past where Zeiss had left it, and the first version showed the strain: its rear element bulged out of the back of the mount, and collectors call it the ping-pong ball. oldlens.com says the nine-element design was Hamano’s. Its optics, rendering and variants are on the lens page; what matters here is how it was sold and what it did for the firm.
Announcement and sale were not the same thing. Japanese Wikipedia, citing a period chronology, has the Leica-thread f/1.1 going on sale in September 1954, together with a 5cm f/1.3, and versions for the Contax and Nikon S bayonets coming later. The 1954 Nakano Times article appears to say the same in its own way: as far as its small type can be read, retail sale began with an exhibition, probably at Mitsukoshi, on 31 August 1954. Nikon’s essay says the lens was “sold in 1953”. The likeliest reading is an announcement in October 1953 and shop sales from the late summer of 1954. The newspaper also lists a mount the catalogue page does not: the Eyemo, Bell & Howell’s 35mm newsreel camera. Old Lens Junkies owns one, No. 3570.
It was expensive. MAP Camera gives ¥95,000, against a salaried man’s monthly pay of about ¥10,000. The Nakano Times appears to quote the same ¥95,000 in November 1954, and adds that the company hoped to bring the price down to about ¥60,000. If that reading is right, ¥95,000 was the price of the first version, not only of the second. Pacific Rim Camera gives an American price of $450, against $299.50 for Nikon’s f/1.1, without a date or an advertisement.
The fame was out of proportion to the sales. Suzuki Takeo, the founder’s son, remembered the lens being covered as the world’s brightest by the Asahi and Mainichi newspapers, the trade papers, the newsreels and the New York Times. Newspapers borrowed Zunow lenses to photograph fireworks and night scenes; the 2006 interview reproduces a clipping of the Ryōgoku fireworks over the Sumida, “a million and a half people” below. In his account those pictures set off the Japanese boom in fast lenses. They also brought work. The first cine lens Zunow made, he said, was a 5cm f/1.1 for the Mitchell, the Hollywood studio camera; its paulownia box, reproduced in the interview, is labelled “ZUNOW STANDARD LENS 50mm F:1.1 For MITCHELL, Teikoku Optical Industry Co., Ltd.” Lenses for 8mm and 16mm cameras followed, for maker after maker, until “production could not keep up and the factory ran flat out.”
In 1954 the institute was incorporated as Teikoku Kōgaku Kōgyō K.K. (帝国光学工業株式会社), the name on the newspaper profile and the Mitchell box. The same year Fuji Photo Film put its Fujinon 5cm f/1.2 on sale, built on new rare-earth glass, and Zunow redesigned its lens. Two designers came in from outside to do it, around the time the first version went on sale: Kunitomo Kenji (国友健司), from Nippon Kōgaku, and 藤陵厳達, from Yashima Kōgaku (八洲光学工業). The 1955 lens had eight elements in five groups, three of them in new glass, and a flat rear. Japanese Wikipedia says the redesign made the lens “in substance f/1.1, as its name said”, which implies the first version had not quite been.
藤陵 explained the new lens himself in Shashin Kōgyō in 1955, as oldlens.com quotes him. The half in front of the diaphragm was a Sonnar, he wrote; the half behind it was a “Zunow type” produced by years of research, the feature that let a lens with conventional glass go far beyond f/1.4 and still leave enough room behind it. Spherical aberration and a soft flare remained from full aperture to about f/2.8, but coma was small. And because so many elements turned the light passing through them yellowish, the company had dropped the usual blue-violet coating for an amber one.
oldlens.com puts the second version from about serial 5400, and says the factory began rebuilding first-version lenses at the same time, so that many early numbers have a flat rear. Old Lens Junkies has a lens that fits: No. 5313 is flat-rear today, and the previous owner’s family say it left the factory as a ping-pong and went back to Zunow to be rebuilt. The same collector has ping-pong rears in the later casing in the 6000s, so the change was not a clean break by serial. A third form exists too. In all-black finish and a more compact barrel, the last version of the f/1.1 is known from very few examples; Leitz offered No. 7001, the first of the series, at €32,000–36,000, and dated it to about 1955. The 5cm f/1.3 serials fall in the same 7000 block.
A new name, 1956
In December 1956 Teikoku Kōgaku Kōgyō became Zunow Kōgaku Kōgyō K.K. (ズノー光学工業株式会社). Hattori gives the reason as bringing the company’s name into line with the name of its lenses. The lenses had got there first: oldlens.com and Inagaki say the engraving on the front ring of the f/1.1 changed from “Teikoku kougaku” to “Zunow Opt.” partway through the 5500s, and they date the rename itself to 1955. The engraving probably changed before the legal name did.
The same month, according to Japanese Wikipedia, three lenses went on sale: the 3.5cm f/1.7, a Gauss type and one of the first 35mm lenses faster than f/2; the 5cm f/1.3; and the 10cm f/2, which CameraQuest thinks was probably the first 100mm lens that fast for a rangefinder. A Leica-thread 5cm f/1.9 is also known, rare enough that Pacific Rim Camera thinks one with a low number was about the tenth made. A 5cm f/1.5 and a 3.5cm f/1.5 are rumoured and have never been seen.
The new name came with a new look. Suzuki Takeo said that someone at Zunow had a classmate at GK, a young firm started by graduates of the new industrial-design course at Tokyo University of the Arts. GK designed the company’s packaging, direct mail, catalogues and cases, and redrew the Zunow logo, which until then had been used in several different ways. He described it as a corporate identity before the term was in use. And in the same month as the rename, Japanese Wikipedia says, investors were found to set up an affiliate, Shinkō Seiki (新光精機), to build the camera that a designer named Arao Kiyoshi (荒尾清) wanted to make. That decision is the turning point of the story.
The everyday business, 1955–1960
The f/1.1 made the name; cine lenses paid the bills. Camera-wiki, following Hagiya, says the production of cine lenses became the company’s main source of income, and that this made it more and more dependent on the cine-camera makers that bought them.
The customers can be traced. Yashica’s first 8mm camera, the Yashica 8 of September 1957, came with a Zunow 13mm f/1.9, and lenses marked “Yashinon-V Zunow” were standard on its 8T3 of 1959. Pacific Rim Camera lists Zunow-Yashinon-V 38mm and 65mm cine lenses. Old Lens Junkies owns three lenses marked “ZUNOW Elmo Cine F1.1”, of 6.5mm, 13mm and 38mm, most likely supplied for Elmo’s cameras. Arco, which turned to 8mm cine cameras in 1956, was another buyer; the founder’s son remembered Neoca as one too, though Neoca’s known Zunow lenses were for its 35mm cameras. There was a 25mm f/1.1 for 16mm, a 38mm f/1.1 for 16mm or 8mm, and a 54mm f/1.2 projection lens. The Zunomatic 13mm f/1.9 for 8mm set its own aperture from a selenium meter; Japanese Wikipedia says the glass itself was made by Kobayashi Seiki.
Zunow also made fixed and standard lenses for other companies’ cameras: a 5cm f/1.9 for the Miranda T and TII, a 6cm f/2.8 for the Halma 44 and the Walz Automat 44, 4.5cm lenses at f/1.8 and f/2.8 for the Neoca and the Auto Terra, and the Zuminor 7.5cm f/3.5 for the Mine Six, which Camera-wiki says was labelled Zunow but designed, and perhaps made, by Ōfuna. The X-ray work of the war came back in peacetime as the Roentgen-Zunow 6.5cm f/1.4, made for Mamiya’s X-30 X-ray camera. The company built one other camera of its own, the Zunow Z16 of 1959, a subminiature for 16mm film.
None of this was glamorous, and almost none of it carried the Zunow name to the public. It was the work of a lens supplier, and a supplier’s fortunes are its customers’.
The camera, 1956–1958
The camera that Shinkō Seiki was set up to build was a 35mm single-lens reflex, and Hagiya dates the start of its development to 1956. Arao Kiyoshi had worked on the Minolta 35 at Chiyoda Kōgaku. He had never designed a 35mm reflex, and according to Hagiya, as Japanese Wikipedia cites him, he did not know how to start, so he modelled it on the Miranda T, then the only Japanese reflex with a pentaprism. GK Industrial Design was involved from the beginning. Arao’s own account says the designers worked from several hundred sketches to about ten wooden mock-ups, and then to three final candidates.
Arao described the result in Shashin Kōgyō in July 1958, in an article titled “The mechanism of the Zunow Pentaflex”, and signed it from the camera department of Zunow Kōgaku. In Japanese the camera is the ズノーペンタフレックス, the Zunow Pentaflex; the camera itself is engraved only “Zunow”, and Western auction houses call it the Zunowflex. (The name Pentaflex was used elsewhere too, for a Tokiwa Seiki reflex of about 1955 and for East German cine cameras. Zunow made no cine camera.)
His aim, he wrote, was the “organic, complete coupling” of mirror, diaphragm and shutter, so that a reflex could be used as quickly as a rangefinder camera. In the Zunow, pressing the release closed the lens to the set aperture, raised the mirror and ran the shutter, and when the second curtain finished its travel a catch let go and the diaphragm opened again at once; the mirror returned by itself. The whole diaphragm mechanism was in the body, not in the lens. The specification box gives the rest: a focal-plane shutter from 1 second to 1/1000 and B, set on a single dial that did not rotate when the shutter fired, its speeds evenly spaced, each double the last; flash synchronisation that switched itself between FP and X; a 180-degree single-stroke lever with double-exposure prevention; crank rewind; a die-cast body of 144 × 88 × 56 mm weighing 615 g without a lens; and a back that came off completely, so that a long-roll magazine could be fitted. The article also promised that the finder could be exchanged for a waist-level hood and the focusing screen changed “in only four or five seconds”, and with the 50mm lens the finder showed the subject at exactly life size.
Four lenses were listed, all coupling to the automatic diaphragm through a mount Arao calls a bayonet and the repairers call a spigot or breech lock: a 58mm f/1.2 of seven elements, which Arao claimed as the brightest lens for a reflex; a 50mm f/1.8; a 35mm f/2.8; and a 100mm f/2. Lenses of 20cm and longer were “in preparation”, and Hayata Camera names a 200mm, a 400mm and a 50mm f/4.5 macro. None of these was ever released.
The camera was announced in Shashin Kōgyō in March 1958. On 25 April 1958 a prototype was shown to the press at Chinzansō in Tokyo. From 5 to 10 August it was shown to the public on the seventh floor of the new wing of Mitsukoshi’s Nihonbashi store, and it went on sale that month. The Mitsukoshi flyer, reproduced in the son’s interview, gives the prices: ¥108,500 for the camera with the 58mm f/1.2, ¥58,500 with the 50mm f/1.8 and case, ¥24,800 for the 35mm, ¥34,000 for the 100mm. The flyer still introduced the company as the maker of the “brighter than the eye” f/1.1.
What the camera was first at
The Zunow is often called the first camera with every feature of the modern 35mm reflex. That needs taking apart, because most of its features had been done before.
The instant-return mirror was not new. The Gamma Duflex had one in 1947, and in Japan the Asahiflex IIB had one in 1954; the Asahi Pentax, the Topcon R and the Minolta SR-2 had them before the Zunow went on sale. The pentaprism was not new either: the Contax S had one in 1949, and the Miranda T, the Zunow’s own model, in 1955. Bayonet and breech-lock mounts went back to the Exakta and the Praktina. Automatic diaphragms were not new as such. The Praktina of 1954, the Topcon R’s Auto-Topcors and the lenses for the Pentax and the SR-2 all closed the lens automatically when the shutter was released. But they were semi-automatic: the lens stayed closed until it was cocked again or the film was wound.
What the Zunow had was a diaphragm that closed and reopened by itself at every exposure, driven from inside the body and coupled to an instant-return mirror, in a 35mm focal-plane reflex. No earlier camera is known to have had that. The Canonflex followed in 1959 and the Nikon F the same year. Japanese Wikipedia and Hayata Camera call the Zunow the first in the world with a fully automatic diaphragm. Arao himself was more careful. In 1958 he wrote that the automatic diaphragms “now in practical use are truly many and varied”, sorted them into types, and claimed only that the Zunow’s differed from all of them by being built entirely into the body and coupled to the mirror and shutter. When the Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers named four Japanese reflexes Mechanical Engineering Heritage No.101 in 2020 — the Asahiflex I and IIB, the Miranda T, the Zunow and the Nikon F — it credited the Zunow with the “fully automatic diaphragm” and did not use the word first.
Nor did the Zunow have every feature the Nikon F would have. The F was a system, and its interchangeable finders and screens were on sale. The Zunow’s were announced and, according to Kurashikku Kamera Senka, never sold.
How the camera failed, 1958–1959
Arao left Zunow straight after the Chinzansō press launch in April 1958, in a dispute with the company’s management. The camera went into production without its designer. Neither Shinkō Seiki nor Zunow had any experience of building cameras, and Japanese Wikipedia, citing Hagiya, says that every one of its more than two thousand parts was bought in from outside suppliers. Suzuki Takeo said the same in 2006: almost all the parts were outsourced and the company only assembled them, “so the yield was very bad and there were many failures.”
Hayata Camera, a Tokyo repairer, says the quality of manufacture could not keep up with the design, failures were common, and many cameras were returned. Hayata Kiyoshi, who has rebuilt six of them, gave the mechanical reason in 2013: the mechanism needed a body about 30 per cent larger to last. The film-advance gears strip their teeth, the shaft that works the diaphragm from the body breaks loose, and each camera he rebuilds needs seventeen to twenty parts made new.
The numbers are estimates, not records. Japanese Wikipedia says parts for about two thousand cameras were in progress, fewer than five hundred were built, and by one account about two hundred were sold. Hayata Camera says fewer than five hundred were made. Hayata Kiyoshi was told about six hundred, of which about eighty per cent were recalled. The son thinks about two hundred sold. The Nikon blog that reproduces Arao’s article says sales were “in the low three digits”. Pacific Rim Camera says the camera was sold only in Japan, in 1958 and 1959, and never exported. Production stopped in 1959. Japanese Wikipedia says the camera business was abandoned in the second half of that year, Shinkō Seiki was wound up, and the parts, the tooling and many of the recalled cameras were scrapped.
The end, 1960–1961
What brought down the company itself was its customers. Neoca, which bought Zunow lenses for its cameras, went bankrupt in January 1960; Arco, its main customer for 8mm lenses, went bankrupt at the end of the year. Suzuki Takeo said that with those two failures the company’s cash flow “rapidly got worse.” A man who grew up near the works, commenting on the Nikon blog in 2011, remembered a rich boy in his middle-school class bringing in a Zunow camera, and later the red flags going up at the company before he heard it had failed. Zunow Kōgaku Kōgyō closed on 1 January 1961. It had announced its famous lens a little over seven years before.
What happened next is told two ways. Japanese Wikipedia, citing Hagiya, says the company went bankrupt and was bought by Yashica. The founder’s son told it as a decision. There had been “a kind offer” to fund the company if it came under another group’s umbrella, he said, but the family felt it could not keep its independence that way, and closed the company instead. He did not name who made the offer. Yashica had been a customer since 1957, so its Zunow-marked lenses do not by themselves show a takeover; they were bought from a supplier.
The son’s account goes on. When the company closed, it was in the middle of developing a 3x zoom for Elmo’s 8mm cameras. Elmo suggested reviving the company, and in 1961, the same year, Suzuki Takeo and Elmo put up the money half each and founded Ace Optical (エース光学). The Zunow name was deliberately not carried over. The story of Ace’s founding is his alone.
Of the people, little is known. 藤陵厳達, one of the two designers of the 1955 lens, is credited by a Japanese review blog with the Yashinon-DX lenses of Yashica’s reflex years and is said to have gone on to Ricoh; a technical paper on the Rikenon Zoom 28–100mm f/4 Macro lists him as a co-author. The histories say nothing of what became of Hamano or Kunitomo, or of Suzuki Sakuta after 1961.
Afterwards
Ace Optical outlived its parent by more than four decades. Its president’s account lists cine lenses, fax lenses from 1980, converter lenses for Kodak’s disc camera from 1982, and lenses for scanners and projectors. In about 2006 or 2007, at the request of the video-accessory maker Phonon, Suzuki Takeo let the Zunow name go back on a product for the first time in nearly half a century: wide-angle converters for video cameras, made by Ace.
The camera that failed has done better in retirement. It is a Mechanical Engineering Heritage of Japan, alongside the Asahiflex, the Miranda and the Nikon F. A complete outfit with three lenses sold at Leitz in June 2022 for €120,000. The famous lens trades for many times what it cost in 1954, and collectors are still working out its versions from serial numbers, because the company’s records do not survive.
Much is still unknown. The founding year is 1930 or 1940. What the navy wanted the lens for depends on whom you ask. How many f/1.1s were made, how many cameras were built, and whether Yashica bought anything at all in 1961, are not settled. What is settled is the shape of it: a subcontractor that became famous for one number, put that fame into a camera it did not know how to make, and depended for its income on small companies that failed before it did.