My first Japanese camera was bought second hand from a police woman in St.Helens. It was a Pentax SV from the 1960s. It had a really lovely lens and was a pleasure to use. Unfortunately the shutter developed a fault, I think I had it repaired but then sold it and I bought a new Pentax K1000 camera with my staff discount from the Saturday job at Fishwicks in Haydock.
An all manual camera like before, it did take a button cell battery but that was just used to power the built in lightmeter.
It was the camera I took and used on the 3 year photo course at Trent Polytechnic in Nottingham and my day to day camera when I moved to London in 1984. It was used to shoot my early conceptual stock images including the “Hand and Lightning” image sold through Tony Stone Images and allowed me to go full time with my photography.
My original K1000 was loaned to the framing department at Tony Stone Photolibrary to record submissions from photographers that were then contact printed and each frame cut out and stuck in the ledger books that recorded the sales and rights uses of the submitted images. By now the camera was getting on a bit and after some months stopped working and was not economically repairable. Fortunately Pentax still made this model and a new one given back to me (the one above).