Ōfuna

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Ōfuna Kōgaku-Kikai Seisakusho (大船光学機械製作所) was a Japanese camera maker, which also used the English name Ofuna Optical Instrument Manufacturing Co., Ltd.[1] It marketed a total of four cameras after the second world war.

History

The company originated during the war, when it started as a factory of Tomioka in Kamakura (the historic city, now effectively a distant southern suburb of Tokyo).[2] The factory was precisely located in the town of Dai, immediately to the north of the main city, in a zone which is commonly known as Ōfuna, hence the name of the company.[3] The factory produced binoculars and other military optics.[4] Tomioka's main factory (in Yukigaya-Ōtsuka, Tokyo) was destroyed by bombing toward the end of the war, and when the war ended Tomioka moved to a western outer suburb of Tokyo. Its Kamakura factory, which had escaped unscathed, raised capital independently and became a separate company.[5]

The newly independent Ōfuna company tried to diversify its activities to various civilian products.[6] It made the Herlight 4×4cm box camera from 1947, and at least one Herlight prototype was made for 24×36mm pictures on 35mm film. This first attempt to enter the camera market was not a success, and the company continued the production of binoculars, making a number of them for the US occupation army.[7]

Some years later, the distributor Kashimura Yōkō, which was already distributing the Ōfuna binoculars, solicited the company to make a line of cameras.[8] These would be the Ofunaflex TLR and the Ofuna Six folder, released in 1953.

Camera list

Other

  • E-Ofunar 7.5cm f/3.5 enlarging lens
  • E-Ofunar 5cm f/3.5 enlarging lens

Notes

  1. English name visible in an advertisement reproduced in Hagiya, p.162 of Sengo kokusan kamera jū monogatari. The translation "Ofuna Optical and Mechanical Works" given in Lewis, p.82, was certainly not used by the company.
  2. Hagiya, p.149 of Sengo kokusan kamera jū monogatari. Lewis, p.82, says that Ōfuna was "a World War II subsidiary of Nippon Kogaku", apparently by mistake.
  3. Geographic extension of Ōfuna: Ōfuna in the Japanese Wikipedia.
  4. Hagiya, p.149 of Sengo kokusan kamera jū monogatari.
  5. Hagiya, p.150 of Sengo kokusan kamera jū monogatari.
  6. Examples are given in Hagiya, p.150 of Sengo kokusan kamera jū monogatari.
  7. Hagiya, p.155 of Sengo kokusan kamera jū monogatari.
  8. Hagiya, p.155 of Sengo kokusan kamera jū monogatari.

Sources / further reading

Links

In Japanese: