About the Company
Kowa Company, Ltd. is a large Japanese diversified manufacturer and trading company founded in 1894 in Nagoya, Japan. It became known primarily for optical products (cameras, binoculars, spotting scopes, lenses), medical equipment, and various industrial goods — not as a major consumer audio electronics brand.
Kowa produced 35 mm cameras and photographic gear from the 1950s through the 1970s, but the company is not historically recognized as a mainstream manufacturer of consumer audio equipment like reel-to-reel tape recorders alongside Sony, Akai, TEAC, Pioneer, etc.
Despite this, at least one reel-to-reel model branded Kowa does show up in vintage audio directories, suggesting Kowa or a related OEM/brand license arrangement produced or marketed a basic portable recorder in the consumer market.
Documented Reel-to-Reel Model — Kowa 101
Model: Kowa 101
Type: Portable reel-to-reel recorder
Country of Manufacture: Japan
Electronics: Solid state (transistor-based)
Tape Track: 1/2 (mono/half-track)
Speed: 7½ ips
Reel Size: ~3″ portable reels
Output: Headphone jack
Intended use: Basic portable recording (dictation/voice) rather than hi-fi audio reproduction.
This unit, which may date from the late 1950s–1960s era of portable tape machines, appears to have been a small, inexpensive solid-state recorder — sometimes described in collector circles as a “spy/portable” model.
Whether Kowa Really Made Tape Recorders
Major historical sources and Kowa’s official corporate history do not list reel-to-reel audio equipment as part of the company’s core products. The official history instead highlights OPTICS (spotting scopes, photographic lenses), medical devices, and other industrial divisions.
That suggests the Kowa reel-to-reel decks were likely either:
A small, short-lived product line that left limited documentation, or
Rebadged units manufactured by a third-party OEM (a common practice in mid-20th-century Japanese consumer electronics).There’s no evidence that Kowa became a significant reel-to-reel supplier the way companies like Akai or Sony did. Its core business focus remained outside tape recorder manufacturing.