Terahertz Pioneer: Hiromasa Ito

Hiromasa Ito grew up wanting to be a scientist like his father before him. The fifth of six children, he was raised in the aftermath of World War II, and like others who have been the subject of these articles, the impact of the war on Ito's life was more than an historic footnote. Ito's father, Yoji Ito was a prominent member of the Japanese Navy (a Commander) and was extremely active in the development of Japan's first radar instrumentation in the early 1940's. Educated at the Technische Hochschule Dresden, Germany, under Heinrich Barkhausen, Yoji worked on high power magnetrons, including the infamous Ku-Go (a microwave variation of Tesla's invisible death ray concept [1]). After the war he was severely restricted in his employment, but he managed to start a company, Koden Electronics, for the peacetime use of his Naval radio technology. Koden Electronics, Tokyo, Japan, still exists today and is known for marine navigation and fish finders