Kazuo Kashio, industrialist, born 1917, married (one son, three daughters), died Tokyo 4 March 1993.
Kazuo Kashio, founder of the Casio computer company, lived a life that was a paradigm of the Japanese success story in the second half of this century. 'The road my life has taken and the road Japan has taken are very similar: moving forward, never resting, and always working very hard,' he wrote in his autobiography, Creativity and Contribution. And, like his country, Kashio started from very humble origins.
Born in 1917 to a poor farming family on Shikoku, the smallest of Japan's four main islands, the young Kazuo remembered that his father only ate rice and taro, because the family had no money for better food. His life changed when the family moved to Tokyo in 1923, where his father sought work rebuilding the city after the Great Kanto Earthquake which devastated Tokyo in September that year.
After primary school, Kazuo went out to find work, and at the age of 14 found himself working on a lathe in a machine-tools factory. But without a college degree he knew he could never rise very far in any company, so during the war he decided to form his own business, initially making aircraft components for Japan's war effort. After the war he made electric cooking-plates, cigarette- holders and anything else he saw a demand for, until he came across his first electric calculator at a business show in 1949 - a huge mechanical device which cost about the same as a car.
Kazuo and his brother Toshio began to design their own calculator, relying more on electric circuits and less on mechanical parts - by 1956 they had made a machine that was 2ft high, 3ft wide and weighed over 200lb. The machine was refined for office use, the company grew and by the early
