Densho Digital Archive
Friends of Manzanar Collection
Title: Kenji Suematsu Interview
Narrator: Kenji Suematsu
Interviewer: Sharon Yamato
Location: Los Angeles, California
Date: April 19, 2012
Densho ID: denshovh-skenji-01-0027

<Begin Segment 27>

SY: Okay, so let's kind of sum it up.

KS: Well, we basically stopped at the, well, the Thompson Optical situation, and then from there continued on to a company called, good lord, I can't remember that one. But anyway, it was an old German gentleman that was an engineer. He created, was doing some machining, and he needed a machinist that knew, understood optics, so he hired me to be in charge of his little machine shop, which was one man. [Laughs] We created what we called a scope to calibrate the television sensors, distance, see mount distances so we can measure the exact distance of it. And that went on to, let's see, from there, I spent maybe a year and a half or two years there with that company, creating or doing my own machining and putting these instruments together. Now, as far as asking me where'd I learn how to do all this machining stuff, that's things that I've been gradually acquiring working at Thompson Optical and stuff, when I have an opportunity to run the machine and get a little coaching or figure out myself how to go about doing all that. So I've acquired enough know how to go ahead and do a production type of deal, and from there I went to... I forget. There was a rental house that wanted to open up an optical plant over in Romoland -- that's in Riverside, near Hemet -- and he hired me to do service tech for him. But then the next day he says, "I want you to go to Romoland and supervise the optical porch there. I have a couple of Japanese optical manufacturers working on the machines there. I want you to work with them as an interpreter." [Laughs] I just said, "Oh, god." Here, my Japanese is not that good, but I was an interpreter anyway. So I spent about two years, a year or two years there, getting that all set up, and the owner of that company -- they were partners -- both of 'em, at least one of 'em used to play around with some women out there and all that stuff, and things financially started to dwindle down. I got laid off, went to work for a transformer manufacturing company for a short period of time. I didn't know nothing about electronics, that much anyway. And from there I start picking up work out of L.A., to do lens repair work, and so I continued on with that and I eventually established a business of my own, working out of Romoland, out of my house.

[Interruption]

KS: Well, going from this Thompson -- I mean, not Thompson Optical but this German fellow's (zolomatics) business there in North Hollywood -- I went to a company called... what was that, Leonetti's? It was two companies involved in the middle of my transition but one was a rental house, and I created, in that rental house, a series of, our first introduction of what we call super high speed lenses for motion picture work. What I had done is taken the Nikon 50 millimeter, 50mmF102 and the 35 millimeter and their 28 and one other, 85 millimeter, they were the fastest of these series that they had on the still. Stripped all the mechanics off it and mounted it in a Mitchell BNC type camera -- it's a standard professional motion picture camera, which I made these lenses work in it -- and I had produced like fifteen sets for this, for this company. And they went out in the field for rental because it was a rare situation for motion picture people to go out there with a motion picture camera without all these lights, to shoot everything with available light, and that was quite an achievement as far as being able to do that. And so after the completion of the fifteen sets they felt that they need anymore, so they, I went back to Romoland and I start, started going back to servicing to keep survival. But at the same time, here's where this Jewish person helped me out a lot, being able to buy sufficient Nikon lenses to start making my own version of another high speed set of BNC lenses. And I started making, piece by piece, a set and sold those individually, as a personal, besides repairing lenses and stuff. And that went on into making several sets for Mitchell Camera Corporation, which is the principal camera. They wanted lenses to fit on their cameras. Fine, said this'll work fine.

And we went from there, and then this company called Leonetti's called me in to work for them, and he was interested in manufacturing his own camera, so he also asked me to design a lens to fit their camera. I said, "Okay, I'll do that. I'll draw that up and go ahead and fabricate it." And the problem was, the engineer they had that was making the camera was not a real good engineer. Consequently, there was a lot of problems and he made constant changes, which means all the lenses I made didn't fit the camera 'cause he made those changes too without notifying us. And finally, about a year after that, after all these failures and stuff, the owner of Leonetti's, Frank Leonetti, he asked me, he says, "I want you to take over the shop, manufacturing shop. Let's get this camera fixed. Do what it takes to get it fixed." And I looked at it, and when you make something you draw a center line. Film goes straight down; film will not go like this [makes crooked line]. It's impossible. And that was the first thing I corrected, and I started correcting the claw movement and everything else. I calculated all this thing out and says, "It needs to be here," this and all that, and we made up the first ten cameras I sold for Leonetti's, with all these little changes and corrections, and made up a set of lenses to go with it. And that was based on similar, not a Nikon lens, but on Zeiss contact lenses, similar structure. And from there, Leonetti went out, sort of went out of business 'cause he was, he himself was competing against Panavision. It's a big, big organization.

So in the meantime, I was back in my little shop at Romoland, doing my own servicing and all this stuff, and this is when Century got interested and would I help them with a product. And this is when all these relationships started there. After Century was finished, this Unique Optics picked me up after I was laid off over there, being too old to work over there, and so the first project that they asked me to do, so Peter asked me, says, "Would you make up these digital series lenses for, design a set for Red Com, Red Dot Com?" And I said, "Okay, we'll do that and hopefully we'll get a production order for it so that we can start making some money." That's when that turned sour. He got the design, he paid us for design, but he took off and went to Tamron to get them to manufacture it. So we went and Leonetti, Unique Optics, formulators, we can produce our own. We are friends with the optical designer. We can buy the lenses independently, attach to their order and we get a pricing and all that, so we went ahead and did that, completed that. In the meantime, he had another client that says, "Can you design a lens that'll withstand a hundred Gs?" I don't know what a hundred Gs is, but we'll give it a shot. [Laughs] Anyway, about four to six months later I designed one, we made up a prototype to see if it will work, and it worked fine. We made ten units and sent them out for distribution for testing. And like I said, I explained the one that went to Ford, test facilities there to run it through the hundred G test since their lab was completed, it was successful there. Nothing happened to it. Every stage focus, everything was clean and everything else is good. And slowly the lenses were going out for small jobs, and one of the jobs it went out on was a launching of the nine rocket unit off of the coast here in California. Because they weren't sure if it exploded how far that was gonna go, they were told to get back, way back, like a couple of miles, and we had this camera set up. It was supposed to launch at like nine o'clock or eight o'clock in the morning, but by the time they got around to shooting it, without warning they shot it off at like twelve or one o'clock in the afternoon. The sun was already up on that side facing the camera people. So you had all these cameras ready to record, and when that launch thing, the smoke, set fire, set the switch, get it going, they shot, they recorded, and our lens in our camera did the same recording. And when they showed it to the security people, make sure that we didn't get anything vital. They showed the image, the rocket was like that [indicates very small] on the, on the image plane, so when they went home they magnified that four hundred times or something to that effect. And they were able to see every rocket rivets, or rivet and all the, and the umbilical cord coming off. That's what they wanted. That's what they needed. Sent the copy of the four hundred time image back to them, says, and they told them, "This is exactly what we needed. And you're the only guys that got it." All the rest of 'em, because the sun was hitting the glass, it blanked out. Ours got, ours captured it. And they says, and that led to other things, and then finally NASA got a hold of the unit. They put in the Ares rocket to run the tests on it. Two Ares rocket crashes, it survived both of them, and then it went into the third one, and 'cause the first two, it recorded everything that was taking place, they finally analyzed what was going wrong and then when they went into the third one it was corrected, so it was able to chute, parachute down. And we got a compliment from NASA, which they rarely do, about, telling us that, "The lens unit you guys supplied us operated flawlessly," and says, "I just wish the electronics would do as well." [Laughs] And that was, that was my whole thing.

SY: Very nice.

KS: I take a great deal of pride on that one thing 'cause it was an unknown going in, it was an unknown going in the process, and then here, after it's all done, that it succeeded in every aspect of it.

SY: So it was a matter of withstanding that force and the clarity of the picture.

KS: Yeah. Yeah, the lens was, because in remounting the lens you had to pay attention to the optical air spacing, the centering and all this when you're doing all the mechanical construction of it. That's the same thing with the zoom lens. All that was paying attention to.

SY: Wow.

KS: But that comes from not just being know how, but using logic and common sense. When you have a straight line going through, you can't have that line alter.

SY: Wow. Very nice. And so you, now this, the, your company, or the, you still are involved with the optic...

KS: I'm still involved with the optics. Right now we're doing a specialty, micro cameras with 3D.

SY: Wow.

KS: Or mini, small miniature cameras they can put on a helmet so they can, for racecars and for road, off road thing. They want to capture all that on 3D.

SY: Wow.

KS: So they want to have good images for professional imagery, for television and stuff like that, which means we have, I have to upgrade what is out there and make sure the alignments and everything meets what I think should be in a way of 3D imagery. Otherwise, you're gonna have a lot of people with headaches and vomiting 'cause the images aren't matched.

SY: So you're still working twenty-four hours, huh?

KS: Well, no, I'm not working twenty-four hours right now. Working, I get up around four or five sometimes and I go on through 'til noon to work on my roses and stuff. I was gonna take, bring you pictures of the roses. My whole field is roses from the backyard, and I have orchids on the one, in the porch, and I have irises going in there. Then I have artichokes and tomatoes growing on the side, and I got peaches and figs and oranges growing in the backyard, back into the yard. And I have grapefruit, tangerine and oranges on the side of the house.

SY: So you learned a little farming along the way.

KS: Well, I have five containers of starts of figs, new figs. And I do that just for entertainment, see if I can do that. [Laughs] I mean, most of the plants in there are cuts, I mean cuttings, other than roses. Then some of the other stuff, they were either there or I bought small cans. And I have a front hedge full of, it's all rosemary, so I have my herbs there and whenever I need a rosemary I just go out there and...

SY: Well, you are very talented. [Laughs]

<End Segment 27> - Copyright © 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.