Obituary: Tsutomu Katoh, founder of Korg Inc
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Tsutomu Katoh was born in Showa-ward, Nagoya City in Japan on 28 August 1926, and after graduating from Nagoya Shogyo commercial high school in 1943, joined the navy and served among the crew of the submarine 'Koryu' (meaning dragon) during WWII.
After the war, he held a position at a trading company, and eventually went on to become the proprietor of a nightclub in the early 1960s. Tadashi Osanai, a noted Japanese accordionist, performed regularly at Katoh's club. Katoh told Osanai, who was also an engineering graduate from Japan's prestigious Tokyo Imperial University, that it would be nice to have a rhythm machine to keep the beat. Katoh and Osanai teamed up to create and market the world's first disk rotary rhythm machine. While working on the proje