A two-room workshop, a gift of shares, and what followed
Our history runs beside the company’s. Each new thing Kiroshi Opticals learned to put in front of the eye, or inside it, sooner or later became something we had to understand, pay for or watch over.
Timeline
- 1919
Kiroshi Shūzō is born in Fuse, a town of small workshops east of Osaka.
- 1944
His mother, Kiroshi Tome, loses the sight of both eyes to cataracts. There is no surgeon she can reach or afford.
- 1952
He opens a lens-grinding workshop of two rooms in Fuse, making spectacle lenses for opticians across the Kansai region. He calls it Kiroshi Kōgaku: Kiroshi Optical Works.
- 1964
The workshop, now a factory, makes its first camera lenses.
- 1971
Kiroshi Kōgaku makes rigid contact lenses, its first product that sits on the eye itself.
- 1978
On 1 June Kiroshi Shūzō endows the Kiroshi Optical Scholarship Society with 2.4 million of his shares. Its first twelve scholarships go to trainee ophthalmologists in Osaka.
- 1983
The Society’s first grant outside Japan pays for cataract camps in Lalitpur, Nepal. The programme that grew from it is now Sight restoration.
- 1986
Kiroshi Kōgaku makes its first intraocular lenses, the artificial lenses that replace a cataract. The Society buys none of them for six years, until a Kansai hospital asks it to.
- 1989
The company is renamed Kiroshi Opticals and listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. The Society’s shares become the largest single holding in the company.
- 1991
Grants for low vision rehabilitation begin, with a mobility training school in Sendai.
- 1994
Kiroshi Opticals begins clinical trials of its first retinal prosthesis. The Society funds an independent review of the trial’s consent process, at its own suggestion.
- 1996
The Society is renamed the Kiroshi Foundation and signs the Arrangement with Kiroshi Opticals, which sets the terms of the relationship that still apply.
- 2003
Kiroshi Opticals launches SEIRAN, its first full ocular implant. Hayashida Kōji becomes Executive Director.
- 2004
Kiroshi Shūzō dies, aged 85. His lathe is still in the workshop where he left it.
- 2007
Mieru school screening begins in Osaka Prefecture with Landolt charts and a van.
- 2009
The East Africa office opens in Nairobi, and the partnership with the Lake Region Eye Trust in Kisumu begins.
- 2011
The Foundation is certified as a public interest incorporated foundation. After the earthquake and tsunami in March, Mieru teams replace 31,400 pairs of spectacles lost by evacuees in Iwate and Miyagi.
- 2014
Kiroshi Reiko, the founder’s granddaughter, becomes chair.
- 2016
The Independent Implant Register opens at the new Chiba Centre for Visual Science, recording harm from optical implants of every make.
- 2018
The Founder’s Workshop reopens as a museum.
- 2019
Kiroshi Opticals discontinues the SEIRAN 2, worn by about 41,000 people. In the same year Raven Microcybernetics, the maker of the Corvid implant, is dissolved.
- 2020
The Continuity programme is founded to help people whose implants are no longer supported by anyone.
- 2021
The research partnership with Frothly begins.
- 2022
Shared Sight launches. Dr Okabe Sena becomes Executive Director.
- 2023
At the Foundation’s request, Kiroshi Opticals agrees to submit its perception models to Frothly’s Blackwall programme for independent evaluation before release.
- 2024
KF-OS 2, the bystander privacy standard, reaches version 1.0. Firmware for discontinued implants begins to be preserved with Frothly’s Lazarus archive.
- 2026
Professor Achieng Otieno becomes the first chair of the Board of Councillors from outside Japan.
Kiroshi Shūzō, 1919 to 2004
The founder left school at fourteen to work for a lens grinder in Fuse and, by his own account, was not much good at it for the first three years. He opened his own workshop in 1952 with a secondhand lathe and a loan from his uncle, and ground lenses by hand until the business could afford machines. He never lost the habit of checking a finished lens by holding it up to the window.
He spoke about his mother’s blindness rarely, and only to explain why he had given so much of the company away. In the letter that accompanied his gift of shares in 1978, which is displayed in the Workshop, he wrote that a lens is only worth what it lets someone see, and that he would like the company’s profits to be measured the same way.
He lived long enough to see the company make its first implant, and is said to have been uneasy about it. Asked in a 2001 interview what he thought of putting lenses inside people, he said he would wait to see what they were used for.