About Kokusai Kohki in English

Welcome to the Kokusai Kohki web site. Our business serves mainly the local Japanese amateur astronomy market but, as we have been blessed with a suprising amount of interest from overseas, and non Japanese language speakers residing within Japan. I am including a little bit of English in keeping with our desire to give the world beyond the big ocean a window into our ever so humble local scene.

The majority of this site will appear a jumbles of strange characters to non-Japanese speaking browsers but please feel free to email me with any questions you may have. Or, if you copy and paste into your email any jumble you may have an interest in, I should be able to read it OK on my email program and get back to you.

Now well into our 20th year, Kokusai Kohki (which translates roughly as "International Light Instruments") was started in April of 1987 on the second floor of my tiny home in western Kyoto. This business began with the offering of large, American made dob mirrors, Novaks scope building parts and an interesting and beautiful 14.5" F4.1 "ball-joint" type telescope made for us by an American university professor.

We`ve grown a bit in the ensuing years, moving three times in the process. We are now housed in a warehouse/office near Kyoto`s beautiful Arashiyama district, famed for its moon viewing bridge and surrounding mountains. The "real" Japan, perhaps...

Our staff of eight hard-working individuals is proud to locally represent SBIG, JMI, Lumicon, Astro Systems, Baader Planetarium, Synta and many other fine overseas companies as their Japan agent. We are also dealers of many excellent local Japanese companies such as Takahashi, Vixen, Borg, Miyauchi, Kenko and Carton.

Our showroom is open from 10AM to 6PM weekdays and from 12PM to 5PM on Sundays. We take Saturdays and Japanese national holidays off. As international travel gets cheaper and easier all the time, I hope that you can make your way to our small corner of the world some day.

Kokusai Kohki prides itself on being able to offer a constant and varying schedule of interesting and useful items from all over the world. We add our own pizzaz to items as needed to help make them more accessible to the local amateur. This includes modifying items to specifically fit local equipment, translating and embellishing users` manuals, even rewriting software into Japanese in the case of SBIG CCD cameras. This formula results in plenty of 12 hour days without weekends but has worked well for us as well as our customers.

A majority of our sales are repeat orders and referalls and we are able to boast a large and satisfied client base thoughout the country, in fact, throughout the world. I hope that we can be of assistance to you one day as well. Clear skies and enjoy!

Barry Gooley
President
Kokusai Kohki
email: magellan@kkohki.com