Canon Inc.
Japanese multinational imaging corporation
Canon Inc. (Japanese: キャノン株式会社; Hepburn: Kyanon kabushiki gaisha) is a Japanese multinational corporation headquartered in Ōta, Tokyo, specializing in optical, imaging, and industrial products, such as lenses, cameras, medical equipment, scanners, printers, and semiconductor manufacturing equipment.
Canon has a primary listing on the Tokyo Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the TOPIX Core 30 and Nikkei 225 indexes. It used to have a secondary listing on the New York Stock Exchange.
Name
The company was originally named Seikikōgaku kenkyūsho (Japanese: 精機光学研究所, lit. 'Precision Optical Laboratory'). In 1934, it produced the Kwanon, a prototype for Japan's first-ever 35mm camera with a focal-plane-based shutter. In 1947, the company name was changed to Canon Camera Co., Inc., shortened to Canon Inc. in 1969. The name Canon comes from Buddhist bodhisattva Kannon (Japanese: 観音, lit. 'Guanyin'), previously transliterated as Kuanyin, Kwannon, or Canon in English.
History
1933–1970
The origins of Canon date back to the founding of Precision Optical Instruments Laboratory in Japan in 1933 by Takeshi Mitarai, Goro Yoshida, Saburo Uchida and Takeo Maeda.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Canon Inc.” is japanese multinational imaging corporation. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Canon, Japanese and multinational, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q62621. VIAF identifies the subject as 148919054. The Library of Congress control number is n80145262. 3 of 11 selected statements include explicit references; 7 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1934, 1947, 1969 and 1933.
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This entry incorporates text from “Canon Inc.” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.