Born in 1930, Ikutaro Kakehashi was just two years old when his parents died from tuberculosis, and he spent much of his youth living in Osaka under martial law. He studied mechanical engineering and simultaneously worked as a schoolboy worker in the Hitachi shipyards where Japan's midget' suicide submarines were built. At just 16 years old, he noticed that, with no watch or clock industry in post-war Japan, there was a thriving business to be had repairing existing timepieces. He was unaware of it at the time, but a chap named Torakusu Yamaha had also started out as a watch repairer, as had Matthias Hohner. Even the Hammond Organ Company started out as a sub-division of the Hammond Clock Company! In response, Kakehashi bought a book on watch repair and set up the Kakehashi Watch Shop.This was a success, and he also started repairing radios. However, at just 20, he was struck down by tuberculosis in both Kakehashi supported himself by repairing watches and radios for the staff and other patients. His condition was gradually becoming terminal when he was selected as a guinea-pig for the newly developed drug, Streptomycin. Kakehashi's improvement was immediate; within a year he had left hospital. In retrospect, he was extremely lucky... the cost of Streptomycin was such that he could never have afforded it, and had he not been selected, it's likely that he would not have survived. In 1954, unable to find employment, Kakehashi opened an electrical goods and repair shop which he named Kakehashi Musen ('Kakehashi Radio'), and this grew rapidly over the next six years. He changed the name to the Ace Electrical Company, and was soon employing around 20 staff. But as early as 1955, he had decided to branch out, combining his electrical skills and his interest in music to develop products for the music market. Like Bob Moog in the USA, his aim was to produce an electronic instrument capable of producing simple monophonic melodies, so he built a four-octave organ using parts from a reed organ, bits of telephones, and simple transistor oscillators. Kakehashi admits that Prototype No. 1 sounded rather different from how he had hoped, so it never entered production. In 1959, he designed and built a Hawaiian Guitar Amplifier, but he also persevered with his organ developments, and, in 1960 — the year in which he founded Ace Electronic Industries — he designed an organ that was to become the Technics SX601. Like Tsutomu Katoh, the man who founded Korg in 1963, and whose life has in some ways paralleled his own, Kakehashi was intrigued by early electro-mechanical percussion instruments such as the Wurlitzer Sideman. So, in 1964, he developed the Ace Electronics R1 Rhythm Ace.  A few years later in 1967 Ace Electronics and Hammond International (the worldwide distributor of the organs built by the Hammond Organ Company)  embarked upon their technical collaboration, Ace became the Japanese importer and distributor for Hammond organs. The following year (1968) the companies formed a joint venture called Hammond International Japan. By this time, Kakehashi and his team were heavily involved in designing new guitar amplifiers and effects units as well as rhythm machines, but it is perhaps for their combo organs that Ace are best remembered. These included the TOP3 (1965), the TOP1 (1969), TOP5, TOP6, TOP7, TOP8, and TOP9, plus the more complex, dual-manual GT7. Unfortunately, continued infusions of capital eventually diluted Kakehashi's shareholding in Ace Electronics to the point where he had become a minority shareholder in his own company. In 1971 the company was sold and Kakahashi opted to leave. Just a month later, in April 1972, Kakehashi established the Roland Corporation. He chose the name for phonetic reasons: he wanted two syllables with soft consonants, and Roland satisfied his criteria nicely. Since then Roland has created many innovative musical tools that have changed our sound capabilities. Their keyboards and digital pianos are constantly pushing the envelope and getting more and more incredible. Stop by our showroom and experience one for yourself. Top of page