Shionogi Brand Guidelines: A Doshomachi Shop of 1878, a Balance-Weight Mark & a Red Ring

A Doshomachi drug wholesaler, 1878.

Shionogi began in Osaka on 17 March 1878, when Gisaburo Shiono opened a drug wholesaler, Shiono Gisaburo Shoten, in Doshomachi, the street of the city’s medicine trade. The company says the day was his 24th birthday, that he had learned the trade from his father, Kichibei, who ran a drug wholesale business, and that the shop stood on the site of today’s Doshomachi head office. Japanese Wikipedia says the company name derives from the founder’s name, and traces the family’s link with Doshomachi to 1789, when the founder’s grandfather was apprenticed there to a drug merchant at the age of twelve.

The shop first dealt mainly in Japanese and Chinese medicines. In 1886, the company says, Gisaburo switched to Western medicines and found an English-speaking business partner so that he could import directly rather than buy from foreign trading houses in Yokohama and Kobe; from 1897 it dealt directly with trading firms in Europe and the United States. Japanese Wikipedia dates a long relationship with Eli Lilly to 1909, beginning with imports of gelatin capsules and including insulin in 1923.

Manufacturing followed. In 1909 the shop launched Antacidin, an antacid and its first drug of its own, developed under the founder’s second son, Chojiro, a pharmacy graduate of Tokyo Imperial University, the company says. A plant, Shiono Seiyakusho, opened in 1910 in what is now Fukushima-ku, Osaka, and in 1912 it launched Digitamin, a heart medicine. In 1919 the wholesaler and the plant merged as Shionogi Shoten; the Kuise plant at Amagasaki followed in 1922 and a new Doshomachi head office building in 1924.

The war years are recorded in outline. The company says its analgesic Sedes began as a prescription drug in 1939, and that in July 1943 the firm was renamed Shionogi Seiyaku to make clear that it would focus on pharmaceuticals. Japanese Wikipedia lists a new Kanzakigawa plant at Toyonaka in 1944 and the merger of Shionogi Chemical Industry, which became the Ako plant, in 1945. After Japan’s defeat, the company says, its overseas offices were lost at once and air raids had destroyed most of its main plant and equipment, leaving it with no drugs to ship, and it then went through its worst financial crisis since its founding. The sources used for this guide do not say whether forced or conscripted labour was used at its plants in those years.

Sulfa drugs, cephems and a statin.

Recovery came through research. Shionogi opened the Aburahi Laboratories in Shiga in 1946 and listed its shares in Tokyo and Osaka in 1949, the company says. Japanese Wikipedia records that it gave up its own attempt to make penicillin in 1949. In 1950 Sedes went on sale over the counter — the company says the palindromic name comes from the English word “sedative” — and in 1953 it launched the multivitamin Popon-S, whose “S” stands for Shionogi.

Its laboratories discovered sulfamethoxazole in 1958 and launched it as Sinomin in 1959, the company says. Japanese Wikipedia adds that the compound was licensed to Roche in 1960 and, through joint work with the British Wellcome laboratories, became part of the sulfamethoxazole–trimethoprim combination sold as Bactrim. From the 1960s Shionogi licensed cephalosporin antibiotics from Eli Lilly; its own Shiomarin followed in 1982 — the company calls it the world’s first oxacephem antibiotic — and Flomox in 1997. Japanese Wikipedia says that by the late 1980s antibiotics made up roughly two thirds of its sales, a dependence that hurt it when antibiotic use fell in the 1990s.

The compound that became Crestor was created at Shionogi in 1991, and AstraZeneca took over its development in 1998, Japanese Wikipedia says; Shionogi launched it in Japan in 2005. In 2001 it set up a joint venture with GlaxoSmithKline for HIV research, later Shionogi-ViiV Healthcare, and English Wikipedia says it became a part-owner of ViiV Healthcare in 2012. Its influenza drug Xofluza followed in 2018, and Japanese Wikipedia records that Japan’s health ministry gave emergency approval to Xocova (ensitrelvir), a COVID-19 treatment, on 22 November 2022. The same source records that in November 2024 Shionogi announced it had received written administrative guidance from the ministry after a lecture event it organised breached guidelines on sales information for prescription drugs.

Its name has also reached television and motor racing: the company has sponsored Fuji TV’s Music Fair since 1964, and English Wikipedia says Shionogi was a main sponsor of Team Lotus from 1991 to 1994.

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.

A balance weight and a red ring.

Shionogi’s mark is older than most of its medicines. The company registered the FUNDOH trademark in 1909; it describes the mark as a stylised image of a balance weight once used to dispense products, standing for “accuracy,” “honesty” and “trust.” On 1 July 2022 the mark was redesigned as a group brand mark, Japanese Wikipedia says: the balance-weight motif was kept, a red ring was named the “Dynamic One Ring,” the SHIONOGI logotype was refined, and the Japanese company name was reset in a typeface shared across the group.

The company has changed shape in recent decades. In 2008 it appointed its first president from outside the founding family and bought the American company Sciele Pharma, now Shionogi Inc., Japanese Wikipedia says. It moved its production into a subsidiary, Shionogi Pharma, in April 2019, and in October 2025 announced that it would absorb that subsidiary on 1 April 2027; its plants include Kuise at Amagasaki, Settsu in Osaka Prefecture and Kanegasaki in Iwate. In 2025 it took over the pharmaceutical business of Japan Tobacco: Torii Pharmaceutical became a wholly owned subsidiary on 1 September 2025, and on 1 December 2025 Japan Tobacco’s pharmaceutical business and its American subsidiary Akros Pharma joined the group. On 27 November 2025 the head office moved to the Park Tower of Grand Green Osaka, which the company calls its global head office, while the Doshomachi building is being renovated to reopen as an Osaka head branch, according to Japanese Wikipedia.

One deal is still open. On 5 October 2026 Shionogi announced an agreement for its subsidiary Shionogi Inc. to acquire IntraBio of Austin, Texas, which sells Aqneursa; the deal was subject to closing conditions and had not been completed at the time of writing.

For a design guide, Shionogi shows how a merchant’s balance weight can carry a drug maker’s identity for more than a century. Compare Takeda, another Doshomachi drug house, and Ono Pharmaceutical, whose own Doshomachi shop dates to 1717. For this guide we use a deep red, a slate ink and a pale stone with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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