Osaka, 1894 and 1923.

Astellas is a young name with two older companies behind it. English Wikipedia describes Astellas Pharma Inc. as a Japanese pharmaceutical company formed on 1 April 2005 from the merger of Yamanouchi Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. and Fujisawa Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. Japanese Wikipedia places its head office in Nihonbashi-Honcho, Chuo, Tokyo. Both of the companies that came together had started out in Osaka, decades apart.

The elder of the two was Fujisawa. The company says Tomokichi Fujisawa founded Fujisawa Shoten in Osaka in 1894, and that in 1897 the business launched Fujisawa Camphor as a home-use insect repellent. The trade magazine PMLive, in a profile published on 18 February 2016, gave the same founding story, describing Fujisawa Shoten as an Osaka-based business whose early product was a form of camphor used against insects. The company says Fujisawa Shoten changed its name to Fujisawa Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. in 1943, set up its base in the United States in 1977 and opened a London office in 1979.

The younger house came later. PMLive wrote that Kenji Yamanouchi founded the company bearing his name, Yamanouchi Yakuhin Shokai, in 1923, also choosing Osaka as its base. The company’s own history gives the same year and city, and says the business changed its name to Yamanouchi Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. in 1940 and moved its head office to Tokyo in 1942. Wikipedia says the two companies began expanding abroad at about the same time, opening offices in Taiwan in 1962 and 1963, and in the United States and Europe from 1977 onwards. The company says Yamanouchi set up Yamanouchi Ireland in 1986.

The combination was built in steps. Japanese Wikipedia says the presidents of the two firms, Hatsuo Aoki of Fujisawa and Toichi Takenaka of Yamanouchi, negotiated the deal, and the company says the over-the-counter businesses of both were joined on 1 October 2004 to form Zepharma Inc. The main companies merged the following spring. Japanese Wikipedia notes that, in legal form, Yamanouchi was the surviving company, while in business the deal was presented as a merger of equals, and that the new company dropped both old brands for a new one. Takenaka became the initial president and Aoki the chairman, and in June 2006 Masafumi Nogimori, who had come from Fujisawa, took over as president.

A coined word and a flying star.

The name was revealed a year before the merger closed. The trade newsletter Pink Sheet headlined on 24 May 2004 that the Fujisawa and Yamanouchi merger would create “Astellas Pharma”. The company now explains the word in its own history: Astellas, it says, expresses the idea of “aspired stars” and “advanced stars”, and derives from the Latin “stella”, the Greek “aster” and the English “stellar”, which all refer to stars. The company adds that the name is also connected to the Japanese phrase “Make tomorrow shine”. Japanese Wikipedia makes the same link, saying the coined name plays on the Japanese words for lighting up tomorrow, with “ashita” meaning tomorrow.

The mark carries the star idea into a picture. Japanese Wikipedia says the company emblem, designed around the image of a star, is called the “Flying Star”, and that it is also a ligature of two characters: the 山 (yama) of Yamanouchi and the katakana フ (fu) of Fujisawa. The single symbol keeps a trace of both founding names, even though neither name survives in the company’s title.

The new identity had to be learned quickly. The Swiss newspaper Le Temps interviewed Susanne Höppner, head of the Swiss business, on 16 August 2005, four months after the merger. She told the paper that the identity was now single and that the products carried the Astellas brand, and she described the new logo as expressing “a light for life”. She said the Swiss operation had taken over the structure of Fujisawa AG at Villars-sur-Glâne in the canton of Fribourg, while Yamanouchi’s Swiss seat had been in Cham, and that the European centre was at Staines, near London. She also called the combination a genuine merger of equals.

A line of words followed the mark. Japanese Wikipedia says that since 2007 the company has used the communication slogan “明日は変えられる。”, which translates as “Tomorrow can be changed”, extending the idea of tomorrow that sits inside the name. In April 2013, Japanese Wikipedia says, the head office moved from the former Yamanouchi building in Nihonbashi to the Nihonbashi Astellas Mitsui Building nearby.

Stars, ligatures and tomorrow.

Corporate identity where the end user rarely looks

Component makers and drug companies share an odd identity problem: the people who use their work most often never see the parent name. A brake module, a sensor or a seat frame arrives inside somebody else’s car, and a medicine reaches a patient under a product name, in packaging shaped by regulators as much as by designers. The corporate mark has to work instead for engineers, buyers, investors, recruits and the towns that host the factories.

That audience shapes the names. Mergers in both sectors often produce a blended word built from the two predecessors, or a coined term with Latin or Greek roots chosen because it carries no prior meaning in any market and can be registered worldwide. Other houses keep a founder’s surname or an old place name long after the business has outgrown it.

The visible identity tends to live in plant and laboratory signage, on gatehouses, lorry livery, safety notices and campus wayfinding. Those settings favour plain wordmarks, a single corporate colour and lettering that stays legible from a distance and in a photocopied procedure sheet. Restraint here is a working requirement rather than a style choice.

Teaching people a new name.

A coined name has to be taught. In the PMLive profile of 18 February 2016, written as the company passed its tenth year, Ken Jones, then president and chief executive of Astellas’s operations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, recalled the starting point. “Ten years ago no one knew who Astellas was – they knew who Fujisawa was, and they knew Yamanouchi,” he said. “Some even thought we were going to be called Fujiyam or Yamafuji.” The magazine wrote that one of the company’s early priorities was to get its name known among the healthcare professionals it wanted to reach.

Europe has been a recurring setting for that work. Le Temps reported in 2005 that the European centre of the new group was at Staines, near London, and PMLive reported in 2016 that the company had moved its European headquarters to a larger site just outside London three years earlier. Wikipedia says Yamanouchi’s research centre at Leiderdorp in the Netherlands dated from its purchase of the pharmaceutical division of Royal Gist Brocades, and that Fujisawa had set up a research centre at Deerfield, Illinois, after buying Lyphomed in 1990, so the merged company inherited sites on both sides of the Atlantic.

The older names did not vanish overnight. Wikipedia says some of the company’s older products continue to be distributed under their original brand, and Japanese Wikipedia records that group companies such as Toyama Fujisawa and Shizuoka Fujisawa were renamed Astellas Toyama and Astellas Shizuoka only on 1 October 2005, six months after the parent changed its name. Other parts of the old structure were sold: the company says it sold Zepharma, the joint over-the-counter business, to Daiichi Sankyo, and Japanese Wikipedia dates that transfer to 13 April 2006, after which Astellas concentrated on prescription medicines.

The company marked its twentieth year in April 2025, it says, still describing itself as the product of the 2005 merger of Yamanouchi, founded in 1923, and Fujisawa, founded in 1894.

For a design guide, Astellas shows how a merger can replace two family names with one invented word, and then keep both founders inside a single drawn star. Compare Takeda, another Japanese drug maker with Osaka roots, and AstraZeneca, whose own name joined two companies in 1999. For this guide we use star red, deep red and ink with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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