Word: kannon
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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That is a question Japanese carver Koryu Kawaguchi asks as well. On the outskirts of Tokyo, the 70-year-old master carver sits on a tatami mat, his workbench and tools covered with a fine ivory dust. In his hands is an ivory figurine of the Merciful Mother Kannon, which he has been carving for a month. Beside him sits his son Ryusei, 37, a fourth-generation ivory carver. The elder Kawaguchi is a gentle man with a reverence for the gleaming white medium he has spent his lifetime bringing to life. His eyes are weak from the strain...
Canon was started in 1937 by Chairman Takeshi Mitarai, a physician, who took the company name from Kannon, the Buddhist figure that represents mercy. The firm made the first advanced 35-mm camera produced in Japan in the 1930s and stayed with these relatively slow-selling models for decades. But after moving into calculators and copiers in the 1960s, Canon applied its electronics know-how to cameras and devised the breakthrough AE-1. The company followed up in 1979 with the Sure Shot, a highly popular $100 pocket camera that automatically focuses itself by using an infra-red beam...