Hitachi, Ibaraki, 1910.

Hitachi takes its name from a place. Wikipedia says the company was founded in 1910 as an electrical machinery manufacturing subsidiary of the Kuhara Mining plant in Hitachi, Ibaraki, by the engineer Namihei Odaira. The Catalan newspaper ARA, in a profile of Odaira published on 17 February 2026, tells how he got there. Odaira had worked for the mining entrepreneur Fusanosuke Kuhara at another copper mine, where he built a power plant to run the machinery, and Kuhara hired him back in 1906 to electrify the mine the company operated in Hitachi.

Odaira had a fixed idea. According to ARA, he had noticed that the machinery used in Japanese industry was built from parts produced abroad, and he wanted Japanese engineers to design and make their own. That goal was reached in 1910, the paper says, when the mine’s workshop produced a five-horsepower electric motor made entirely in Japan. The milestone moved Odaira’s department from repairing foreign machinery to designing and producing its own, and ARA treats it as the start of Hitachi as a technology company and of Odaira as its founder.

The workshop became a company over the following decade. ARA describes an apprentice school that Odaira set up to train technicians, and says shortages of imported parts in the 1910s pushed the company to handle the whole manufacturing process itself, which led it to create departments for quality control and for research and development. In 1919 a fire destroyed the Tokyo headquarters that had opened two years earlier, the paper says. From 1920, according to ARA, Hitachi operated separately from its parent company, and four years later it built its own electric locomotive. Fans, elevators and refrigerators followed over the next decades. Odaira retired in 1947, ARA says.

Sun, rise and a monogram.

The name carries an image. Wikipedia says the word Hitachi combines the kanji for “sun” (日, hi) and “rise” (立, tachi), and that it was coined by Odaira. ARA also breaks the place name into the two concepts of sun and a standing figure, and says the founders took that idea as the basis of the new company’s corporate image. The two characters are simple and strong, which made them suitable for a symbol as well as a name.

That symbol came from Odaira too. Wikipedia says Hitachi has used a monogram of the two kanji that make up the word Hitachi as its corporate symbol, or monshō, and that it was conceived by Namihei Odaira. The monogram appeared on Hitachi’s products until 1991. In other words, for about eight decades a Hitachi motor, appliance or television carried a small emblem drawn from the characters of the company’s own name.

The roman-letter wordmark took over on the products after that. In 2000, Wikipedia says, Hitachi adopted the slogan “Inspire the Next”, and the old symbol was gradually phased out of the branding as the statement was built in. The monogram was not abandoned altogether: Wikipedia says it is still used to represent the company itself rather than its products and services.

Hitachi set out its thinking at the time. In a release dated 29 August 2001, the company said it had introduced a brand management programme in April 2000 and defined “Inspire the Next” as its corporate statement of value, containing its intention to continue to breathe new life into the next era. Until then, Hitachi said, its corporate advertising outside Japan had changed format and message from region to region. From September 2001 a global campaign would use uniform formats and messages built on the statement, handled by a single agency, McCann-Erickson, rather than a different agency in each region.

Founders, characters and statements.

Corporate names in East Asia often carry a meaning of their own. A company may take its name from a word for a mood or a hope, from a line of classical poetry, or from a folk tale known well beyond the region, and that meaning is then repeated in speeches, annual events and advertising. The name works as a small story that customers can retell.

Mascots are another recurring device. A drawn animal or character can stand in for a service that has no physical product, appearing on screens, plush toys, packaging and office signage, and it can stay in use long after the logo beside it has been redrawn.

For businesses that live inside phones, the app icon is frequently the version of the identity that people see every day. Icons are reduced to a single closed shape and one or two colours so they remain legible at fingertip size, while the full wordmark is kept for larger formats.

Campaign naming built on calendar dates is a further pattern: a day and month written as numbers become the name of an annual event, which can be printed, counted down and repeated every year.

From a motor to a statement.

Hitachi’s brand history moves from an object to an idea. The founding story is about a motor, a physical thing made in a mine workshop. The monogram was a mark stamped on goods. “Inspire the Next” is something else again: a statement of intent rather than a description of products, adopted at a point when the company’s businesses ranged from power systems and railways to information technology. ARA noted in 2026 that Hitachi has been making trains for many decades, even though many people still associate the name mainly with electronics.

The 2001 campaign was designed to make that statement travel. Hitachi said its overseas advertising had previously focused on the principal business of each region; the new approach put one message and one format in front of audiences in every market. Choosing a single agency for the whole world, the company said, was meant to ensure uniformity. A brand that had begun with two kanji on a nameplate was being explained in English to people who might never see the old monogram.

The name has also been carried by the group’s many companies. Wikipedia notes that the power grid business acquired from ABB was renamed Hitachi Energy in October 2021, and that Hitachi Data Systems became part of Hitachi Vantara in 2017, after which the Hitachi Data Systems name and logo were no longer used. In each case the Hitachi name was placed at the front of a new compound, so the parent brand stays visible across very different businesses.

For a design guide, Hitachi shows how a company can keep a founder’s monogram for the corporation while letting a plain wordmark and a short English statement do the work in advertising. Compare Toshiba, another Japanese electrical maker known by a red wordmark, and Mitsubishi, whose three-diamond mark also began as a crest. For this guide we use red, garnet and ink with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Hitachi’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.