Nobutoshi Kihara (木原信敏 ''Kihara Nobutoshi'', 14 October 1926 – 13 February 2011) was an

engineer Engineers, as practitioners of engineering, are professionals who Invention, invent, design, analyze, build and test machines, complex systems, structures, gadgets and materials to fulfill functional objectives and requirements while considerin ...

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 ...

, best known for his work on the original

Walkman Walkman, stylised as , is a brand of portable audio players manufactured and marketed by Japanese technology company Sony since 1979. The original Walkman was a portable cassette player and its popularity made "walkman" an unofficial term for p ...

cassette-tape player in the 1970s and was commonly called ''Mr. Walkman'' in the press. Born in Tokyo, Kihara attended

Waseda University , mottoeng = Independence of scholarship , established = 21 October 1882 , type = Private , endowment = , president = Aiji Tanaka , city = Shinjuku , state = Tokyo , country = Japan , students = 47,959 , undergrad = 39,382 , postgrad ...

, then joined Sony's predecessor, Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation in 1947 as a new university graduate. He retired from Sony in 2006. While at Sony, he worked on

Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the n ...

's first magnetic tape recorders, portable tape recorders, music stereo systems, Betamax video,

digital camera A digital camera is a camera that captures photographs in digital memory. Most cameras produced today are digital, largely replacing those that capture images on photographic film. Digital cameras are now widely incorporated into mobile devices ...

s, a compact cassette magazine-type recorder and Japan's first transistor radio. In 1964, a team led by Kihara developed the

CV-2000 CV-2000 was one of the world's first home video tape recorders (VTR), introduced by Sony in August, 1965. The 'CV' in the model name stood for 'Consumer Video'. This was Sony's domestic format throughout the 1960s. It was the first fully transis ...

, the world's first VTR intended for home usage. He also was instrumental in creating cassette versions of the VTR (Video Tape Recorder),established the basis for the

U-matic U-matic is an analogue recording videocassette format first shown by Sony in prototype in October 1969, and introduced to the market in September 1971. It was among the first video formats to contain the videotape inside a cassette, as opp ...

system. In 1981, was involved in the development of the

Mavica Mavica (''Magnetic Video Camera'') is a discontinued brand of Sony cameras which use removable disks as the main recording medium. On August 25th 1981, Sony unveiled a prototype of the Sony Mavica as the world's first electronic still video cam ...

digital still camera, which used floppy disks to record images and developed the Mavigraph color video printer in 1982. In 1988, Mr. Kihara jointly established the Sony-Kihara Research Center with Sony, becoming the center's president. His tutoring methods were dubbed the "Kihara School", and turned out many of Sony's future engineers.

Masaru Ibuka Masaru Ibuka (井深大 ''Ibuka Masaru''; April 11, 1908 – December 19, 1997) was a Japanese electronics industrialist and co-founder of Sony, along with Akio Morita.Kirkup, James"Obituary: Masaru Ibuka,"''Independent'' (London). December 2 ...

, a Sony co-founder, referred to Mr. Kihara as "a godlike person", because he would create a prototype of a concept he and Mr. Ibuka had discussed, often within a day. Nobutoshi Kihara died at 5:20 am on 13 February 2011, due to heart failure. He was 84.Obituary: Nobutoshi Kihara
''The Telegraph'', 21 February 2011.

References

1926 births 2011 deaths Japanese electronics engineers Sony people Waseda University alumni Recipients of the Medal with Purple Ribbon {{japan-engineer-stub