Columbia in Japan wasn't the same company. It became Denon.
That's another one of those things I keep getting reminded of, forget, get reminded of again, forget again...
The fact that Columbia US records were released in Japan as CBS should have been another reminder for me, as should the fact that the font used for the Columbia logo on the hardware doesn't match what was used in the US at the time.
Columbia in the US was just a name put on electronics and built by others.
When I was a kid, the family record player was a Voice of Music that I think my mother received as a high school graduation present. On the back of some of the old Columbia records you could see ads for "Columbia" record players that were kinda like softcore porn: You could see *just* enough to get your imagination going and infer what was really happening. In that case, what they showed sure looked a lot like Mom's record player.
Some time around 1970 we got someone's old castoff Packard Bell stereo with a built-in turntable that, like what we had before, had gold-colored metal parts, red speed/on-off knobs and just generally looked very, very, very similar.
So for a while I just believed that everyone was copying everyone else's designs. At some shockingly recent point I finally learned that in fact TONS of turntables/record players out there were actually made by Voice of Music and others just put their names on them.
