Ricoh: The Company Born From Paper

A Laboratory Decides to Sell Something

In nineteen thirty-six, a man named Kiyoshi Ichimura took charge of a tiny new company with thirty-three employees and three hundred and fifty thousand yen of capital, and set about selling a very unglamorous product: light-sensitive paper. Not cameras, not computers, not copiers. Paper. Specifically, sensitized paper for duplicating blueprints, the kind an architect or an engineer needed to make copies of a technical drawing. That little paper company is the seed from which one of Japan's great technology firms grew, and the strangest part is where it came from.

It came from a laboratory. Japan had a national research institute, the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research, and that institute had a problem familiar to research labs everywhere: it kept inventing useful things and needed some way to turn them into money. So it set up a commercial arm to sell the fruits of its science, and one of those fruits was sensitized paper. On the sixth of February, nineteen thirty-six, the paper division was split off into its own company under Ichimura, and a future giant was born out of a physics lab's gift shop.

The Spirit of Three Loves

Ichimura was not just a businessman. He gave the company a creed he called the Spirit of Three Loves: love your neighbor, love your country, love your work. It sounds quaint now, but it became the founding principle the company still cites, the kind of moral spine that Japanese firms of that era built into their identity from day one. A paper company with a philosophy. That tells you something about how seriously these people took the idea that a business was also a way of being in the world.

The name came later, and it came from the lab. The institute was known by a short Japanese name, Riken, and when the paper company eventually grew up and took the name of its own products in nineteen sixty-three, it became Ricoh, a soft echo of Riken itself. So the name you see on copiers and cameras around the world is, at its root, a tribute to a national physics institute. Hold onto that detail. Riken is going to come back in a way you will not expect, in a different episode, attached to a completely different company. The lab seeded more than one giant.

The Camera Years

Before Ricoh was the office machine company most people picture, it was a camera company, and a genuinely inventive one. By nineteen sixty it had released what was billed as the first electric-eye camera developed by a Japanese company, a camera that could read the light and set its own exposure. Then in nineteen sixty-two came the Ricoh Auto Half, a small, charming, half-frame automatic camera with a spring motor wind, and it was a massive popular hit, made in various forms into the nineteen eighties.

This camera DNA never died, and it matters because it explains something Ricoh owns today. In two thousand and eleven, Ricoh bought the Pentax imaging business from another company. Pentax. The legendary camera marque. So Ricoh became the steward of one of photography's most storied names, and through it the maker of cult objects that photographers still adore: the Pentax cameras, the Ricoh GR series of pocket cameras that street photographers treat as a secret weapon, the Theta cameras that capture a full three hundred and sixty degree sphere in one shot. The paper company that started by helping people copy blueprints turned out to have one of the great photographic souls in the industry tucked inside it.

From Paper to Pixels

But the business that made Ricoh huge, the one that built the towers and employs the tens of thousands, was office automation. Copiers. The plain paper copier, the multifunction machine that prints and copies and faxes, the unglamorous gray box humming in the corner of every office on earth. Ricoh became one of the dominant names in that world, a quiet titan of the photocopier age, turning over the equivalent of many billions of dollars a year.

[calm] And here is where the whole arc becomes quietly beautiful. Think about what Ricoh has actually done across ninety years. It began by making the sensitized paper you would copy a document onto. Then it made the copiers that copy the documents. The company spent the better part of a century mastering every step of putting marks on paper and reproducing them. Paper, then the machine that copies the paper. Its entire existence has been wrapped around the physical document and the act of duplicating it.

Buying the Scanner King

So when the world started going digital, when paper began, slowly, to lose its grip, Ricoh faced the same question every paper-and-copier company faced: what do you become when the documents stop being physical? And Ricoh's answer closes the loop on this entire story. It went and bought the scanner king.

Remember PFU, the invisible giant from Yokohama that builds more than half the world's document scanners? Ricoh acquired eighty percent of it in twenty twenty-two, and bought the final twenty percent from Fujitsu in twenty twenty-five, taking full ownership and rebranding the famous fi, SP, and ScanSnap scanners from the Fujitsu name to the Ricoh name. Sit with the poetry of that. The company that was born making the paper you copy documents onto, that grew up making the copiers, has now bought the machines that turn all that paper back into pixels. Paper, to copier, to scanner. Ricoh has owned every single stage of the document's life, from the blank sensitized sheet to the digital file, across ninety years and one complete technological revolution.

A national physics lab spun out a paper company in nineteen thirty-six. That paper company became a camera pioneer, then a copier empire, then the keeper of Pentax, and finally the owner of the world's scanners. It even kept a whisper of the lab's name in its own. And that lab, Riken, the silent grandparent at the very start of this, is about to show up again, standing behind a second giant, in a way that ties this whole accidental family together. That is where we go next: to the company whose name is a German engineer and a telephone switch.