was a Japanese engineer who became the president of
Sony
, commonly stylized as SONY, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. As a major technology company, it operates as one of the world's largest manufacturers of consumer and professional ...
.
[.]
Iwama was born in
Nagoya
is the largest city in the Chūbu region, the fourth-most populous city and third most populous urban area in Japan, with a population of 2.3million in 2020. Located on the Pacific coast in central Honshu, it is the capital and the most po ...
and studied
geophysics
Geophysics () is a subject of natural science concerned with the physical processes and physical properties of the Earth and its surrounding space environment, and the use of quantitative methods for their analysis. The term ''geophysics'' so ...
. He worked in a
seismology
Seismology (; from Ancient Greek σεισμός (''seismós'') meaning "earthquake" and -λογία (''-logía'') meaning "study of") is the scientific study of earthquakes and the propagation of elastic waves through the Earth or through other ...
laboratory at the
University of Tokyo until 1946, when
Akio Morita hired him to work at a predecessor of Sony. By 1950, he was a director of the company. At Sony, he helped introduce the first Japanese
transistor radio in 1954, and the first transistor television set in 1960. He headed the
Sony Corporation of America from 1971 to 1973, and became president of Sony from 1976 until his death of colon cancer on August 25, 1982.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Iwama, Kazuo
1919 births
1982 deaths
20th-century Japanese businesspeople
Sony people
University of Tokyo alumni