Mr. Wakamiya is elegant, refined and normally good-tempered. One of his cousins is a onetime prime minister who everyone knows. This family background may lead to the elegance of Mr. Wakamiya.
The story which I heard from a senior colleague describes his personality a little. One day, Mr. Wakamiya said at length, "I like the dinner without using any knives and forks," while his colleagues were eating and drinking cheerfully and boisterously in a tavern with Mr. Wakamiya. Hearing the story, I had thought a celebrity would refer to a person like Mr. Wakamiya.
Mr. Wakamiya is interested in artistic handicrafts and products, as they remind him of the presence of a craftsperson and artist in those days. His collection includes cameras and lenses and also the brass microscopes manufactured in the 19th to 20th centuries and its relevant data. For cameras, he seems to be fond of miniature cameras in particular, and he reportedly hailed his son's birth by giving him a mini-camera instead of a toy. Ordinary people would want to talk about what they possess when they are collecting cameras.
However, Mr. Wakamiya would never tell us the full story of his collection. I once tried jointly with Mr. Ohshita to find out what cameras Mr. Wakamiya had collected and we identified four to five cameras by implication, though our superior has been keeping his lips shut tight. The full facts about Mr. Wakamiya's collection still remain unknown.
Well, I'll give you an old story about when Mr. Ohshita and I held a round-table talk with Mr. Wakamiya about cameras in our younger days. I said, "The rangefinder on the X becomes imprecise after a prolonged period of use. Repair costs a lot of money …" Mr. Ohshita responded to my complaint by saying, "You should be able to repair and adjust it by yourself." Then Mr. Wakamiya added, "Mr. Sato, do not use it because it goes out of order when you use it." Mr. Ohshita and I looked at each other stunned. Mr. Wakamiya was quite different from us, and he considered the camera as a collector's item rather than something to be used.