was a Japanese engineer who became the president of

Sony is a Japanese multinational conglomerate (company), conglomerate headquartered at Sony City in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. The Sony Group encompasses various businesses, including Sony Corporation (electronics), Sony Semiconductor Solutions (i ...

.. Iwama was born in

Nagoya is the largest city in the Chūbu region of Japan. It is the list of cities in Japan, fourth-most populous city in Japan, with a population of 2.3million in 2020, and the principal city of the Chūkyō metropolitan area, which is the List of ...

and studied

geophysics Geophysics () is a subject of natural science concerned with the physical processes and Physical property, properties of Earth and its surrounding space environment, and the use of quantitative methods for their analysis. Geophysicists conduct i ...

. 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 (or generally, quakes) and the generation and propagation of elastic ...

laboratory at the

University of Tokyo The University of Tokyo (, abbreviated as in Japanese and UTokyo in English) is a public research university in Bunkyō, Tokyo, Japan. Founded in 1877 as the nation's first modern university by the merger of several pre-westernisation era ins ...

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 A transistor radio is a small portable radio receiver that uses transistor-based circuitry. Previous portable radios used vacuum tubes, which were bulky, fragile, had a limited lifetime, consumed excessive power and required large heavy batteri ...

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