Shimadzu Brand Guidelines: Kyoto 1875, a Founder’s Crest & a 2002 Nobel Prize

A Kyoto workshop for school science.

Shimadzu began in Kyoto in 1875. The company’s own history says that Genzo Shimadzu Sr. started making physics and chemistry instruments for education at Kiyamachi-Nijo in the city; its corporate profile gives the date as March 1875, and the formation of a limited company as September 1917. The company says its founding was driven by Japan’s ambition to establish itself in science, and its corporate philosophy is still “Contributing to Society through Science and Technology.”

The early milestones in the company’s chronology mix science teaching with showmanship. In 1877, it says, Genzo Sr. built a manned balloon from a single illustration and made Japan’s first successful private manned balloon flight, watched by a crowd of about 50,000 at the Kyoto Sento Imperial Palace. In 1878 he received technical guidance from the German scientist Gottfried Wagener, using a pedal-powered wooden lathe obtained from him, and in 1882 he published a catalogue of 110 physics and chemistry instruments for schools. The company dates its first radiographs to 1896 and what it calls Japan’s first medical X-ray device to 1909.

The second generation widened the business. In 1917 the storage-battery department became a separate company, Japan Storage Battery — today’s GS Yuasa — and Shimadzu itself was reorganised as a joint-stock company with Genzo Shimadzu Jr. as president. In the years that followed it added testing machines, balances, the Diana medical X-ray system of 1918, a Berlin branch office in 1923 and, from 1925, mannequins: at their peak, the company says, it made more than 85 per cent of the mannequins in Japan, a business that continues today under another company. In 1930 Genzo Jr. was named one of Japan’s ten greatest inventors, the company says, for a method of making lead powder for storage batteries.

Spectrographs, aircraft parts and a Nobel.

Analytical instruments arrived in the 1930s. Shimadzu dates an industrial X-ray apparatus to 1933 and its first spectrograph, which it calls Japan’s first, and its first X-ray analyser to 1934.

The war years are recorded in the company’s own chronology: it began manufacturing aircraft equipment in 1936 and process-control instruments in 1940. A Shimadzu works at Yamanouchi in Kyoto appears in a memorandum from the Allied occupation headquarters dated 31 August 1946, SCAPIN-1172, among the installations removed from the occupation’s list of aircraft factories, military and naval arsenals and laboratories held under custody. The company says that in August 1945, one day after the war ended, an emergency board meeting began the process of winding up its wartime activities; all employees resigned in September, 2,865 were rehired the following month, and production resumed in November under a new president, Yosuke Suzuki.

The instruments that define the brand today followed. The company lists Japan’s first domestically produced electron microscope in 1947, a photoelectric spectrophotometer in 1952, a direct-reading optical emission spectrometer in 1953 and Japan’s first gas chromatograph in 1956, the same year it set up an aircraft equipment division. Abroad, it opened a New York office in 1963, set up Shimadzu (Europa) in West Germany in 1968 and Shimadzu Scientific Instruments in the United States in 1975, and says it began making analytical instruments in the United States in 1983 and in Germany in 1987. In 1989 it bought the British Kratos Group.

The most widely cited moment came in 2002. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry that year was shared by John B. Fenn, Koichi Tanaka and Kurt Wüthrich; the Nobel Foundation gives Tanaka’s affiliation at the time of the award as Shimadzu Corp., Kyoto, and cites the development of soft desorption ionisation methods for the mass-spectrometric analysis of biological macromolecules. In 1987, it says, Tanaka showed that laser pulses could turn protein molecules into ions in gaseous form. Shimadzu set up the Koichi Tanaka Mass Spectrometry Research Laboratory in 2003.

Instruments on show.

Laboratory instrument makers tend to present themselves through the laboratory itself. Their pictures are usually of benchtop instruments in bright white rooms: chromatographs, spectrometers and titrators lined up on long benches, with sample trays loaded and a screen beside each one showing a chromatogram’s peaks or the curve of a spectrum. The instrument is often shown with its door open or a vial in a gloved hand, so that the scale of the work is clear.

People appear in a familiar costume. Scientists in white coats, safety glasses and nitrile gloves lean over a pipette, check a result on a monitor or load a rack of samples, and the setting is usually a clean, well-lit room rather than a factory floor. Lab automation brings its own imagery: pipetting robots moving across a deck of microplates, grippers lifting a plate from one station to the next, and close-ups of tips, tubes and wells.

The same settings recur across the category: product photographs on plain white or pale grey backgrounds, cut-away diagrams of an instrument’s inner path, and data shown as it would appear on the screen — a set of peaks, a spectral curve, a titration curve or a grid of wells coloured by result. In this kind of picture the instrument, the sample and the data carry the message, and a maker’s name usually appears as a badge on the casing or a logo in the corner.

Trade fairs remain central to how the industry shows itself. Exhibitions such as analytica in Munich, Pittcon in the United States and ACHEMA in Frankfurt bring instrument makers together on large stands, where new instruments are launched and demonstrated. The guides that follow look at what can be checked about each maker — who founded it, who owns it and how its name has changed — and keep the company’s own claims separate from what independent sources record.

“Excellence in Science.”

Shimadzu’s emblem is unusually well documented by the company itself. It says the “Circle Crossed” emblem — a cross inside a ring — was adopted as a trademark by the founder in 1912 and later redrawn on a scientific basis: the ring’s width is one-eighth of the outer diameter, and the cross bars are another 10 per cent thicker, to correct the optical illusion that would otherwise make the widths look unequal. Its origin, the company says, goes back to the late 16th century, when Yoshihiro Shimadzu, lord of Satsuma, is reported to have allowed Sohbei Inoue, an ancestor of the founder, to use the Shimadzu name and the family crest after Inoue attended him at Himeji. Japanese Wikipedia adds that the founder’s family had no blood tie to the Satsuma Shimadzu clan.

Its brand statement is three words, “Excellence in Science,” and its management principle, set in 1992, is “Realizing Our Wishes for the Well-being of Mankind and the Earth.” Shimadzu Corporation remains headquartered in Kyoto, where its corporate profile gives a group workforce of 14,649 at 31 March 2026, with Teruhisa Ueda as chairman and Yasunori Yamamoto as president and chief executive. Its businesses span analytical and measuring instruments, medical systems, vacuum and industrial machinery, hydraulic equipment, aircraft equipment and optical devices. Its chronology records manufacturing companies in the Philippines from 1996, in Suzhou, China, from 1998 and in Malaysia from 2016, alongside the Hadano Works in Japan, established in 1991. In 2025 it marked its 150th anniversary.

For a design guide, Shimadzu shows how a 150-year-old company can carry a founder’s crest into a laboratory brand. Compare HORIBA, another instrument maker from Kyoto, and Agilent, another maker of chromatographs and spectrometers. For this guide we use a deep indigo, a vermilion and a warm paper with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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