Mitsubishi Tanabe Brand Guidelines: Tanabeya 1678, a 2007 Merger and a 2025 Rename

A shop in Tosabori and a street of medicine merchants.

The company traces its start to 1678, when Tanabeya Gohei, the first of the name, opened a business in Tosabori, Osaka, making and selling a compound remedy known as Tanabeya medicine, according to the history published by its historical museum. The museum reaches back further still: it says that in 1604 the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu granted an ancestor, Tanabeya Matazaemon, a licence to trade with Luzon, in today’s Philippines. The company describes itself as one of the oldest pharmaceutical companies in the world.

Its address became its identity. In 1791 the sixth Tanabeya Gohei moved the business to Doshomachi, Osaka’s street of medicine merchants, and joined its traders’ guild, and in 1855 the eleventh opened a store in Doshomachi 3-chome, where the head office still stands, the museum says. Japanese Wikipedia adds that the business began handling Western medicines in 1870.

The house also learned to trade on marks. In 1882, the museum says, Tanabe Gohei Shoten won sole distribution rights in Japan for salicylic acid made by the German firm Chemische Fabrik von Heyden and sold it under a pictorial trademark — the “Rising Sun, Crane and Tortoise” mark. In 1901 a branch opened in Nihonbashi, Tokyo, which later became the separate company Tokyo Tanabe Seiyaku. A factory followed in 1916, the first in-house new drug in 1922, according to Japanese Wikipedia, and a plant at Onoda, Yamaguchi prefecture, in 1925. The business became a joint-stock company, Tanabe Gohei Shoten, in December 1933.

In the war years the company expanded its plants. In July 1939 it built the Kashima plant in Osaka, which the museum calls its main plant; in September 1942 it opened an Osaka research laboratory there; and in August 1943 it changed its name to Tanabe Seiyaku, Japanese Wikipedia says. Another future branch of the group dates from the same years: in 1940 Takeda Chobei Shoten, today’s Takeda, and Nippon Kasei, a forerunner of Mitsubishi Chemical, formed the joint venture Takeda Kasei, which built a plant at Yoshitomi in Fukuoka prefecture in 1942 and was renamed Yoshitomi Pharmaceutical in 1946. The sources used for this guide do not say whether forced or conscripted labour was used at these businesses during the war.

Four lineages, one merger in 2007.

After the war Tanabe Seiyaku listed its shares in Tokyo and Osaka in 1949 and, according to the museum, received the first Deming Application Prize for quality management in 1951. It launched the Aspara range of aspartic acid tonics in the 1960s and the calcium antagonist Herbesser in 1974.

The Mitsubishi side of the name came through a chain of mergers. Tokyo Tanabe Seiyaku and Mitsubishi Chemical combined their drug businesses as Mitsubishi-Tokyo Pharmaceuticals in 1999; Yoshitomi had merged with the Green Cross Corporation in 1998 and was renamed Welfide in 2000; and in 2001 Welfide and Mitsubishi-Tokyo Pharmaceuticals merged as Mitsubishi Pharma. On 1 October 2007 Tanabe Seiyaku and Mitsubishi Pharma merged to form Mitsubishi Tanabe Pharma, with Tanabe Seiyaku as the surviving company, Japanese Wikipedia says.

One of those lineages carries serious history. Green Cross began in Osaka in 1950 as the Japan Blood Bank. The Asia Business Daily reported in January 2024 that its founder was a former Army Medical School instructor who had researched plague in Unit 731, the Imperial Japanese Army’s biological-warfare unit, and that many former members of the unit worked there. In February 2000 an Osaka court sentenced three former Green Cross executives to prison terms over the sale in the 1980s of unheated blood-clotting products that carried a risk of HIV infection, the Associated Press reported — the first convictions in Japan’s tainted-blood scandal. In September 2008 Mitsubishi Tanabe and its subsidiary Benesis reached a basic agreement with plaintiffs in the national hepatitis C litigation over blood products, Japanese Wikipedia says.

The merged company had its own finding. On 13 April 2010 Japan’s health ministry ordered Mitsubishi Tanabe and its subsidiary Bipha to suspend business for 25 days over falsified data in the application for the albumin product Medway, Pharma Japan reported.

Its medicines since include Radicava, approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in 2017 according to English Wikipedia, and Uplizna, launched in Japan in 2021, the museum says. Mitsubishi Tanabe was delisted from the Tokyo Stock Exchange on 27 February 2020 and became a wholly owned subsidiary of Mitsubishi Chemical Holdings.

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.

Bain Capital, a new name and a mark of hands.

The Mitsubishi era ended in 2025. Bain Capital agreed in February 2025 to buy the company from Mitsubishi Chemical Group, and on 1 July 2025 Mitsubishi Tanabe Pharma became a Bain Capital portfolio company after all its shares were transferred to the fund’s special purpose company, Pharma Japan reported. On 1 December 2025 the company changed its name to Tanabe Pharma Corporation; a company release that day said the name honours the legacy of the former Tanabe Seiyaku. Japanese Wikipedia says the company left the Mitsubishi group after the purchase. Its North American units became Tanabe Pharma America and Tanabe Pharma Canada.

The head office remains in Doshomachi, in a building completed in 2015 that includes the Tanabe Pharma Historical Museum, the museum says. On 5 November 2026 the company said it would begin work at a new Tokyo head office in Shibaura, Minato ward, on 14 December 2026. Its sites listed by Japanese Wikipedia include Onoda in Yamaguchi prefecture, where the plant founded in 1925 now belongs to the manufacturing subsidiary Tanabe Pharma Factory, and Yoshitomi in Fukuoka prefecture.

The visual identity is explained on the company’s website. It says its brand mark takes the form of hands gently enfolding the health of people around the world, and that its corporate colour, blue, stands for “intellect,” “technology” and “ethics.” The company also has a mascot, Tanamin, a fairy with big blue hands that it says watches over Doshomachi. Its mission, “Creating hope for all facing illness,” dates from April 2021, according to Japanese Wikipedia.

For a design guide, Mitsubishi Tanabe shows how a merchant name can outlast a conglomerate name: after more than three centuries, a merger and a sale, the company went back to Tanabe. Compare Takeda, its Doshomachi neighbour and a founding partner of the Yoshitomi line, and Shionogi. For this guide we use a Doshomachi blue, a merchant ink and an old brass with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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