User:Johnbear
I began as a general collector, then "specialised" in Taiyodo Koki (which changed its name to the Beauty Camera Company). I think I got sucked down the Rabbit hole of trying to gather information about this forgotten, obscure and even mysterious manufacturer that once supplied cameras to the British high street retailer Dixons ... so surely they couldn't have been that insignificant and inconspicuous?
All lines of research initially led to Camera Wiki, in so much that almost every Internet scribbling has unquestioningly copied Camera Wiki's wisdom. Repetition makes a fact seem more true, regardless of whether it is or not. However, as I began to unearth material and - more importantly - translate known documents, Japanese blogs, and apply some lateral thinking, it became apparent that much of the detail at Camera Wiki is wrong (Gulp!).
In the spirit of respecting other's work, I have left the misconceptions largely intact and offered an alternative history.
The big inaccuracies are that
- Taiyodo was never a distributer: it was shop (called Camera Taiyodo) selling used goods. Translation of the supporting Wiki-linked documents (and others) makes this clear, but moreover, the impact of WWII ensured that Japanese industry collapsed, the people were starving, and there was nothing to distribute! Let's not forget Japan was "Nuked" and millions died in the conflict.
- I'm still researching the allegation of Bankruptcy in 1957, but I think the evidence for this is paper thin (quite literally a single reference on one page of a book that was a rework of a translation of an earlier publication), and the rapid recovery of the company about to go under is unprecedented. I (and a few Japanese bloggers) think it is far more likely that Taiyodo Koki simply changed their name to match that of their product, as did Canon, Miranda, Nikon, Olympus, Topcon, etc, etc. If something walks like a duck, looks like a duck and goes quack, it's probably a duck.
I put together a website in 2021, and I am still - unbelievably - unearthing fragments of new information every now an then. I don't have a domain address (that's another story), so Google will not index me, but thankfully other search engines like Bing are not so fussy. Remarkably, a few people have found my website https://heyjohnbear.wixsite.com/taiyodo and been able to offer snippets of information. It would be brilliant if there were others who had some evidence-based knowledge, but I guess there aren't too many people like me!
