Chugai Brand Guidelines: Juzo Ueno’s 1925 Import House, an Ampoule Mark and Roche

An import agent set up after the Great Kanto Earthquake.

Chugai dates itself to March 1925. The company says that two years after the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, Juzo Ueno, then 32, set up an import agent for products of the German pharmaceutical company Gehe, with seven employees. He called it Chugai Shinyaku Shokai. Chugai means “in” and “out,” or “domestic and overseas,” the company explains: the idea was to bring good medicines into Japan and one day to send Japanese medicines abroad. It celebrated its 100th anniversary on 10 March 2025.

The company soon made its own products. Its chronology says it began manufacturing in 1927 and in 1930 launched Salsobrocanon, an analgesic and antipyretic. When imports of its raw material, calcium bromide, became hard to obtain after the Manchurian Incident of 1931, the company says, Ueno led work to make it in-house, which succeeded in 1937.

The war years appear in the company’s own chronology. In March 1943, which it describes as “the height of World War II,” the firm was reorganised as a joint-stock company and renamed Chugai Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd., with its head office in Tokyo. In April 1944 it acquired Matsunaga Pharmaceutical and built a plant in Hiroshima Prefecture. In April 1945 its headquarters and its Ikebukuro, Sakai and Takada plants were destroyed in the war; the head office moved to the Takada plant in June, and production restarted there in December 1945. The sources used for this guide do not say whether forced or conscripted labour was used at the company’s plants.

The post-war recovery rested, the company says, on two products. In 1951 it achieved the industrial synthesis of glucuronic acid, sold as Guronsan and exported to 31 countries, mainly in Europe; in 1952 it launched Varsan, a household insecticide first sold as a tablet vaporised in a tin spoon over a candle. Chugai went public in 1955 and listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in March 1956.

From chemicals to antibodies.

From the 1980s Chugai turned towards biotechnology. Its chronology records a stake in the American venture Genetics Institute in 1983, the purchase of the US diagnostics company Gen-Probe in 1989, and two biopharmaceutical launches, Epogin in 1990 and Neutrogin in 1991. In 1986 it began joint research with Osaka University on inhibitors of interleukin-6, work that led to Actemra, launched in Japan in 2005, which the company calls Japan’s first antibody drug. Actemra was approved in the European Union in 2009 and in the United States in January 2010, the company says. Chugai sold its over-the-counter business to Lion Corporation in 2004.

The decisive change was the alliance with Roche. Roche had sold products in Japan since 1904 and set up Nippon Roche in 1932. In January 2002 Manufacturing Chemist reported that the two companies would merge Nippon Roche into Chugai, keep the Chugai name and base, and give Roche a majority holding of 50.1 per cent, with Chugai managed autonomously as Roche’s exclusive pharmaceutical representative in Japan. Gen-Probe was spun off first. At a meeting in Tokyo in June 2002, about 90 per cent of shareholders approved the deal, swissinfo.ch reported, adding that the company would keep the name Chugai with the tag line “a member of the Roche Group.” The merger took effect in October 2002, and Chugai remained listed.

The company now calls itself an R&D-oriented pharmaceutical company. It names antibody engineering and macrocyclic peptides as its core technologies. Its later medicines include Hemlibra, a bispecific antibody approved in the United States in November 2017 and launched in Japan in May 2018, and Enspryng, approved in the United States in 2020; its timeline also records Alecensa, launched in 2014, and Vabysmo, which in 2022 marked its first full entry into ophthalmology. It says its products are approved in more than 120 countries. Since 2006 manufacturing has sat in a subsidiary, Chugai Pharma Manufacturing, which took over the Ukima, Fujieda, Utsunomiya and Kamakura plants; the Kamakura plant closed in 2010. In 2023 the company closed its Fuji Gotemba and Kamakura research laboratories and began full operation of Chugai Life Science Park Yokohama, in Kanagawa.

Design and documentation.

Japanese drug makers tend to present themselves through places and archives as much as through products. Research campuses carry much of the weight: Chugai began full operation of its Chugai Life Science Park Yokohama, in Kanagawa, in 2023, and earlier ran a research laboratory at Tsukuba, in Ibaraki, from 2001 to 2005; Otsuka Pharmaceutical opened an Osaka Research Center for Drug Discovery in 2022, according to the companies’ own timelines. Photographs of laboratories, glass façades and scientists at screens recur across their websites and reports.

History is the other recurring theme. Several of these companies trace their roots to the Meiji and Taisho eras, and their anniversary pages lean on archive photographs of early shopfronts, factories and founders, including the old medicine-trading streets of Doshomachi in Osaka. Chugai marked its 100th anniversary in March 2025 and the Otsuka group its centenary in 2021, and both publish detailed chronologies of how their names and symbols changed.

The visual language is mostly cool and clean. Blue and white dominate packaging and corporate marks: Chugai moved its corporate colour from green to blue in 2002, and Otsuka describes the large O of its group symbol in “Otsuka BLUE.” Alongside prescription medicines, many of these firms sell consumer products, such as health drinks, eye drops and nutrition bars, that put their names on pharmacy and convenience-store shelves; Otsuka’s Pocari Sweat, launched in 1980, is one example.

Trade shows complete the picture: booths at international partnering events such as BIO and at CPHI Japan show the companies to licensing partners and suppliers rather than to shoppers. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — its founding, its owners, its war years and its symbols — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

An ampoule that stands for a character.

Chugai has documented its logo more fully than most drug makers. Its first mark, in 1931, was a monogram of CSS, for Chugai Shinyaku Shokai. In 1937, when the Takada plant was built, it switched to the initials TSS, and around 1938 to a design based on the name Chugai with the character for “medicine” behind it. In 1947 the company adopted the mark that still shapes its symbol: an ampoule of its injectable Salsobrocanon, with a benzene ring in the middle, together standing for 中, the character for “inside” that begins the name Chugai. The rounded ampoule was given its present sharp shape in 1962, and from 1968 the name appeared below the mark.

Colour has changed with ownership. In August 1979 the company redrew the logo with the word CHUGAI inside it and introduced “Chugai Green” as its corporate colour, chosen to express “life,” “safety,” “growth” and “cleanliness.” In October 2002, with the Roche alliance, the Roche logo was placed beneath the existing design, and the colour changed from green to blue, which the company links to the sea, the sky and the earth. In 2025, its centenary year, the blue was made more vivid to improve visibility, the company says.

The result is an identity that holds two names at once. Chugai keeps its own symbol and listing in Tokyo, while the line “a member of the Roche Group” ties it to its Swiss majority owner, as swissinfo.ch reported in 2002.

For a design guide, Chugai shows how a company can keep a symbol drawn in 1947 while its owner, its colour and its science change around it. Compare Kyowa Kirin and Astellas, two more Japanese drug makers in this series. For this guide we use a deep sea blue, a night blue and an old green with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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