<Begin Segment 22>

SY: Talk, go back a little bit and talk about the Kenji lens, 'cause that's the one that you had to test in, with the force?

KS: Yes. That's that lens right there.

SY: And people approached you to develop a lens that did what? I mean, how'd it originate? How did the notion --

KS: Well, this lens, this lens here was just a contractual thing that we were deciding to put out. I was originally designing the original lenses for the Red Dot Com Company. They put out the first video camera for seventeen thousand dollars. They needed lenses for it, and they wanted to have the lens in the same price range as the camera. So I took a contract with them to develop a set of lenses for them. They had five lenses in the set that I designed, but he wanted certain, he wanted a certain look on his lens. He always had more color to it, this, that, and it looked like a football when he got through with it. That's what I call it, a football lens. [Laughs] And he wanted it to look like a Cooke lens on top of that, the windows and all this other thing, that's where the Cooke appearance comes in. He wanted it real fat in appearance so that, he says, "If you look at this fat lens and if you look at this skinny lens, which one looks like more expensive?" He says, "Well, if you talk to the average person, the fat lens looks more expensive," so that's what he wanted. So fine, we gave it to him. We were hoping to get a contract to manufacture the lenses for him, but he took the contract and he went to Tamron and had them manufacture it, throwing us out. So several months later we decided we'll put out our own set, but it will be different from the set that he's got. There's things that we can improve upon always. [Laughs] And up to that point we had this whole set, and we even got his okay. We had only come to one agreement, we can only sell a hundred sets a year. And we can only sell the first set after he introduced the first set on his part. I said, "That's not a problem, 'cause we're gonna hand fit these. They're gonna, each individually by hand. Hundred sets will be pretty tough for us to go beyond that."

And everything was working fine, except rumors start getting that this lens is far superior to the lens he's got, and he didn't like that. And then on this, on top of that, you start getting all these different optical reports on the extensive testing of these lenses compared to his. His was mechanically weak, 'cause Tamron is not a high class camera manufacturer, lens manufacturer. They were second, third rated, and they'd do only thing in mass production, make a hundred of 'em, slap 'em all together. [Laughs] And that shows up, especially among the professionals. And we excused that situation, but then when this boss of this company decided to put out what he called the Razor version, which is a conversion of the back to a Canon fitting camera. There was the lens, we just take them out, put a Canon camera, I mean mount it on there and alter it slightly all the way back in the lens, and call it a Razor. That would be different than he contract of putting out a hundred sets of these, which means it leaves them free to put out another brand. It could be the same lens but another brand with a different shape and different application, different camera, but he didn't like that. He didn't, wasn't notified. And we told 'em, "You should notify him that we're gonna do this." But he didn't notify them, so the minute he introduced it, Red Dot Com sued him, thinking that he's broken his contract. By that time we only had maybe thirty lenses sold out there. We never met the hundred yet, but with the Razor he thought we were selling thousands already, and that's on the basis on that rumor that he heard is why he's suing them.

SY: I see. That's still going on, then?

KS: That's still going on.

SY: Wow. But now you have, with your name, the series with your name on it, is that something separate? Is that, that lens series, that Kenji Suematsu...

KS: The Kenji Series is separate from the one that Red has. We're, the whole, one of the obligations that we had, we had not, we could not commit or even indicate that we were involved with their lens sets, design or otherwise or anything. But anyway, they're looking at, in the industry that we were in, anyway, looking at somebody else's make, just by the pattern of that make they can identify who did it. You know that.

SY: Interesting. So that kind, but it's such an intricate kind of knowledge that you have, that somehow you developed over the years, obviously had some training and experience. But was that something, as a young kid did you, were you, like, inventive as a young child like that, coming up with things?

KS: I was resourceful. I mean, not to the extent that I am now, but within the limits of that time period, yes.

SY: And you made, did you make your own toys, other than the ones your father...

KS: In some, in some cases, yes, I did make my own whatever, jigs or rigs or things that I wanted. I do that now, even today, when I'm making up test equipment. I make it, I carve it out of wood or whatever it is to give me the fundamentals of it, to see how it works. I also have now, like in the last several years I had, I have papier mache knowledge, clay and wire mesh and whatnot, and I utilize all this in molding objects, making objects. Like my grandchild does hockey and every birthday I used to make what I would call a Christmas envelope, but it's a, what do you call it, a unique piece of equipment that he has to figure out how to open it. It would have little tricks to open it up and all that sort of thing, and on top of that I may have a papier mache, clay combination model of him playing hockey, and he would, that kind of thing. I was gonna bring some photographs, but, show you what I use wire frame and all the papier mache and clay and all that, put it all together and figure out, make a box to do all these little tricky things. And I says that the challenge is for me to make it complex enough that it'll take him several minutes to open it up. And it went on year after year after year, and I says, "I give up." [Laughs] And I did the same, I do the same for the granddaughter. On her birthday, she has this dog, they have three dogs and she loved this one dog, and the dog, when you look at a blank dog with blank, no brains, it has no expression, no nothing. There's just nothing there. But she loves that dog, and I says, well, and she says, "Don't make my box with the secret locks in it. I'd just be..." she's not into puzzles. I said fine, okay. So I made a clock with a dog, that dog's face. I took a photo portrait of that dog and I made a papier mache face of that dog and painted it and put little bones for the numbers of things, and then she had a name tag with the dog's name on it, and this clock had one of these swinging things, I made the name tag thing on that with its name on it. [Laughs]

SY: Wow, you could probably sell a few of those. [Laughs]

KS: Well, the thing is, they take a great deal of care and I didn't realize it meant that much to them, 'cause when they had this fire going on up in Anaheim Hills over there in Corona, or just past, other side of Corona, they were told to evacuate, take all your belongings, take what you want. Those kids just grabbed everything I made for them and that's the only thing they took with 'em, and I thought, "Jesus, that is something saying a lot of what they consider valuable to them." [Laughs]

SY: Very much so. I, that's really amazing.

<End Segment 22> - Copyright © 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.