A foundation for the eye, endowed by a lens maker
We were founded in 1978 by Kiroshi Shūzō, who ground spectacle lenses in a workshop in Higashi-Ōsaka and watched his mother go blind from a cataract nobody could afford to treat. The company he started became Kiroshi Opticals. The foundation he endowed with its shares is us.
What we do
We pay for people to see: cataract operations, corneal transplants, spectacles for children who cannot read the board, rehabilitation for people whose sight cannot be restored. We pay for research into how people see, and into how devices see on their behalf. And because the company our founder started now makes cybernetic eyes and retinal implants, we have taken on a duty he could not have imagined: keeping watch over the safety of optical implants, of every make, and helping the people whose implants have been abandoned by the companies that made them.
We do this through six programmes, through grants made in open calls, and through the Chiba Centre for Visual Science, which runs the Independent Implant Register and writes our open standards.
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Sight restoration
Cataract surgery, corneal transplants and retinal implants for people who could not otherwise pay, through 41 partner hospitals in nine countries.
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Mieru vision screening
Eye tests for schoolchildren and older people where they already are, with free spectacles the same month. Mieru means “can see”.
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Implant safety
The Independent Implant Register, which records harm from optical implants of every make, and fourteen free aftercare clinics.
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Continuity
Help for people whose implants their makers no longer support: repairs, firmware kept safe in escrow, and a fund for replacements.
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Living with low vision
Rehabilitation, mobility training, braille and magnification for people whose sight cannot be restored, and work with employers who will hire them.
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Shared Sight
A way for implant wearers to donate anonymised vision data to research on low vision, under rules set by a data ethics board.
Five rules we hold ourselves to
- We publish outcomes, not activity. Not how many operations we paid for, but how many people could see afterwards, measured the same way every year, including the people who did not come back.
- We state our conflicts before anyone asks. Our endowment is mostly shares in a company that makes some of the devices we pay for. Every page where that matters says so.
- We fund through open calls. Our own staff are a minority on every assessment panel, and anyone connected to an implant maker leaves the room for implant decisions.
- We pay for the unglamorous part. Follow-up visits, transport, spare parts, audits, the second year of a programme as well as the first.
- We make our standards free. Anything we write about how implants should work is free to implement, by any maker, including our founder’s company’s competitors.
How we are funded
The Foundation is funded entirely by its endowment, which was worth ¥684.2 billion (about US$4.5 billion) on 31 March 2026. Two-thirds of it is invested in Kiroshi Opticals K.K., in which we hold 23.8% of the shares; the rest is invested in a diversified portfolio under a policy set by the board. In the year to March, dividends from Kiroshi Opticals paid for 81% of our charitable spending.
This means that when the company does well, we can do more, and when it does badly, we must do less. It also means we have a direct financial interest in a business whose products appear in our own programmes. We explain how we manage that on the page about our relationship with Kiroshi Opticals, and our full accounts are on the financials page.
Where we work
Our programmes run in Japan, Bangladesh, Canada, Ethiopia, Kenya, Nepal, the Philippines, Tanzania, Uganda, Viet Nam and the United States. Our staff of 214 work from six offices.
- Tokyo 東京Headquarters
- Chiba 千葉Chiba Centre for Visual Science and the Independent Implant Register
- Osaka 大阪The Founder’s Workshop, open to visitors
- Nairobi ナイロビEast Africa programme office
- Lalitpur ラリトプルSouth Asia programme office
- San Francisco サンフランシスコKiroshi Foundation USA, Inc.
- HistoryFrom a lens workshop in 1952 to the Implant Register
- GovernanceThe boards, the 1996 Arrangement and how we vote our shares
- Leadership and staffThe people who run the Foundation
- Annual report 2025–26The year in figures, and the chair’s letter
- Our partnership with FrothlyIndependent oversight of optical implants
- The Founder’s WorkshopA museum in Higashi-Ōsaka, open on Thursdays