Display settings
Text size
Contrast
Spacing
Kiroshi Foundation 公益財団法人キロシ財団
Menu
Heritage

The Founder’s Workshop

Two rooms on a back street in Fuse, Higashi-Ōsaka, where Kiroshi Shūzō ground his first lenses in 1952. It is now a small museum, free to visit, and the lathe still works.

Fig. 4. The Founder’s Workshop, street front A narrow two-storey timber building between two neighbours. The upper floor has a slatted window under a tiled eave. The ground floor has a wooden lattice front and a doorway hung with a white cloth printed with a single broken ring, the Foundation’s mark. A tall wooden sign beside the door reads Kiroshi Kōgaku in Japanese. A bicycle leans against the neighbour’s wall. キ ロ シ 光 学
Fig. 4The Workshop from the street, drawn from the 1958 photograph that hangs inside the door. The sign still reads Kiroshi Kōgaku.
Visiting
Open
Thursdays, and the first Saturday of each month, 10:00 to 16:00
Closed
National holidays, and 28 December to 4 January
Admission
Free. Groups of more than eight, please write first.
Address
1-14-8 Fuse-kita, Higashi-Ōsaka, Osaka 577-0001
Contact
workshop@kiroshi.org

Access

Four minutes on foot from Fuse Station on the Kintetsu Nara and Osaka lines. Leave by the north exit, cross the shopping arcade and take the second turning on the right. The Workshop is the narrow wooden building with the white cloth over the door.

The ground floor is step-free from the street, and the workshop room has a raised tactile model of the lathe and a large-print and braille guide in Japanese and English. The upper room, where the founder lived until 1961, is reached by a steep stair and is shown on a screen downstairs for visitors who prefer not to climb it.

Inside

What you will see

The workshop room has been kept as it was in the 1950s: the secondhand lathe the founder bought in 1952, his grinding laps and polishing pitch, trays of spectacle blanks, and the window where he held every finished lens up to the light. On the first Saturday of each month a retired Kiroshi Opticals technician demonstrates the lathe, and visitors may grind a simple lens of their own to take home.

The second room holds a small display on the company and the Foundation, including the founder’s letter of 1978 that accompanied his gift of shares. It also holds, at the chair’s insistence, a display on the SEIRAN 2: a working device, its support notice of 2019, and a letter from one of its wearers to the company, shown with her permission. “If the Workshop is going to tell the story of what the company made,” the chair said when the display was added in 2020, “it should tell all of it.”