Dr. Haruo Takenaka is not a household name at least in Polychrome, but he has made an important contribution to Fuji, Polychrome and the graphic arts industry all together. When he became in charge of Fuji Yoshida plate manufacturing plant, he asked his staff to go out in the field to do a time study of work flow at customers to see where the bottleneck in production was. The study was summarized in a Pareto chart (one of the seven most important tools in Quality Control in which he was familiar) and it revealed that the most time consuming part of the printing production process was 1) page make up 2) vacuum drawdown time and 3) exposure time. The conclusion out of this study was that the page make up would be outside of their plate business so that they (Fuji) should concentrate in their effort to speed up the vacuum drawdown and the exposure speed. Thus their new vacuum drawdown technology (spray coating of dots on plate surface) was developed and the plate sensitivity was increased. We at Polychrome was a beneficiary of the new vacuum drawdown technology as our licensing agreement included a provision that we could use any technology developed by Fuji and our plants were quickly equipped with such spraying equipments. Dr. Takenaka was not a graduate of one of the prestigious universities almost all Fuji executives come from and his assignments at Fuji tended to be in the non traditional (non silver photography that is) area such as in polyester base, PS plate and then copying machine (Xerox), nevertheless he seems to have made a great contribution to Fuji and to the each industry he has touched. No wonder he was invited back after his short stay in the then subsidiary of Fuji...Fuji Xerox to the position of an executive vice president of Fuji Film. We only met him for a few years while he was in Fuji Yoshida, but we were very quickly impressed by his in depth knowledge and understanding of the plate technology despite of his new and short exposure to PS plate business. We were all saddened when he passed away unexpectedly while he was still relatively young as we come to respect him and considered him to be a great friend of Polychrome.
Dr. Haruo Takenaka, then in charge of Fuji Yoshida plant
at one of the Polychrome-Fuji technology exchange meetings,
Dr. Takenaka at right and
from left, Simon Chu, Konrad Richter, Gene Golda, Mr. Yonezawa ( of Fuji)
