Sundrug Brand Guidelines: Setagaya 1957, a Fuchū Head Office, a Red Fascia and Dirx

One pharmacy, then a chain run from western Tokyo.

Sundrug began as a single shop in Setagaya, Tokyo, in December 1957. Its founder was Tada Yukimasa, and the company’s own history and Japanese Wikipedia both date the start to that month; Japanese Wikipedia places the shop at Sakuragaoka, near Chitose-Funabashi station on the Odakyu line. Toyo Keizai, the Tokyo business weekly, gave the same founding story in June 2021: a Setagaya start in 1957, with the chain growing from 1965.

That 1965 date marks the move from shop to chain. In April 1965 the business was set up as a limited company named Sundrug and began opening further branches, the company says, which is why its corporate profile still gives 1965 as the year of establishment. In July 1980 it was reorganised as a joint-stock company, Sundrug Co., Ltd., and in December that year it opened a suburban drugstore in Hachiōji, on the western edge of Tokyo. The head office moved to Fuchū, also in western Tokyo, in March 1987, and has stayed in the city since, moving to its present site in April 1998.

The company’s timeline reads largely as a record of systems and warehouses rather than flagship stores. It lists sales and ordering data going online in 1985, a picking-system distribution centre in Kunitachi in 1986 and point-of-sale tills in every store from November 1991. By the end of March 2026 the company counted 59 distribution centres across Japan on its corporate profile.

The listing history is short and plain. Sundrug registered its shares for over-the-counter trading with the Japan Securities Dealers Association in August 1994, listed on the second section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange in September 1997, moved to the first section in September 2002 and, when the exchange was restructured, to the Prime Market in April 2022.

Growth outside Tokyo came region by region. Japanese Wikipedia dates the first store in the Tōkai region to a Numazu branch in Shizuoka in July 1993, Kyushu to an Iizuka store in Fukuoka in 2001, Tōhoku to Aizu-Wakamatsu in 2004, the Kinki region to Nara in 2005 and the Chūgoku region to a store in Yonago, Tottori, in 2006.

A drugstore, a convenience hybrid and a discounter.

Much of that spread came through partners rather than only through shops of its own. From the 1990s Sundrug signed franchise agreements with regional retailers, among them the supermarket chains Queen’s Isetan in 1996 and Ichiyama Mart in 1998, and with drugstore operators in Hokkaido, Niigata, Ōita, Aichi and Shikoku, the company’s history shows. Several of those franchisees later became subsidiaries: Seikōdō Yakkyoku of Niigata in 2009, the Aichi operator later called Sundrug Tōkai in 2011, Sundrug Plus of Hokkaido in 2014 and Ōya of Ehime, which runs the mac drugstores, in October 2022.

The group therefore trades under more than one name. Seikōdō runs stores called Drug Tops, and Japanese Wikipedia notes that their signs are designed to match those of Sundrug’s own stores. In Hokkaido, a joint venture with the supermarket group Arcs, Sundrug Ace, was founded in June 2016; the Hokkaido news site Real Economy recorded its first store, SA Drug Muroran Chūō, opening on 25 November 2016.

One format covered in detail by the trade press is Sundrug CVS, which Diamond Chain Store Online glossed in May 2015 as “Customer Value Store.” The magazine described a mix of drugstore health and beauty goods with what a convenience store offers: boxed lunches, a bank ATM, parcel handling, fast food and freshly brewed coffee. The first three CVS shops, in Koiwa, Jimbōchō and Ikejiri, used a fascia of their own. The fourth, opened near Tokyo’s Kasumigaseki office district in Toranomon in February 2015, instead used the drugstore style: a red ground with the name サンドラッグ written large in katakana. By then the lunches were made for the chain on a dedicated line by an outside maker, the magazine reported.

The group also has a mascot. Japanese Wikipedia records that a point card issued with the Rakuten loyalty scheme from July 2019 carried the company character “Dr. Sundrakko.” Sundrug also began national television advertising in 2007, according to the same article.

Alongside the drugstores it runs dispensing pharmacies, some attached to drugstores and some standing alone near clinics, the company says.

How Japanese drugstores and discounters present themselves.

Japan’s discount stores, value-apparel chains and drugstores tend to present themselves above all through the shop floor. At Don Quijote, Japanese Wikipedia describes a method called “compressed display,” with goods packed in so tightly that the store becomes half a maze, and price cards written by hand: each store employs its own POP writers, whose lettering the chain calls Donki moji. In these chains the sign on the shelf often does more identity work than the logo above the door.

Own-brand ranges are the second layer. Large groups sell their own lines under names that sit alongside the store name rather than replacing it; Pan Pacific International Holdings, the parent of Don Quijote, lists ranges such as Jonetsu Kakaku, launched in 2009, and EDRP, whose packs are printed in black and white to cut costs. Mascots work in the same way. Don Quijote’s penguin, Donpen, dates from 1998, and in 2021 the company set rules for how the character may appear in signs and illustrations.

Store names are usually plain. Some come from a founding family or an older family shop, others from a borrowed idea: the Don Quijote name comes from Cervantes’s novel, according to a company FAQ quoted by Unseen Japan in 2022. Many chains also run a second name for a format or a market, such as Don Don Donki for stores outside Japan.

Behind the stores sit corporate websites that set out founders, parent groups, timelines and stock-exchange listings, often in both Japanese and English. This guide uses those pages for dated company facts, adds encyclopaedia and press sources where they exist, and describes each chain only by what it sells, how its stores look and who owns it, with no claims about the products themselves.

A drugstore group with a discount arm.

A second store format joined the group in December 2009, when Sundrug made Dirx a subsidiary. Dirx, based in Saga, runs discount stores in Kyushu, Chūgoku and Shikoku and beyond; the company says they stock about 16,000 lines, from food and daily goods to kerosene, alcohol and medicines, and its group page counted 439 Dirx stores at the end of March 2026. The two formats sit side by side: Toyo Keizai described the company in June 2021 as running Sundrug drugstores nationally, centred on Tokyo, together with the Dirx discount stores, with 1,216 stores in total at that time.

The current president came up through the group. Diamond Chain Store Online reported in April 2019 that Sadakata Kōji, who joined Sundrug in 1989 and had led Dirx since June 2014, would become president on 1 May 2019. In November 2020 the same publication reported that Sundrug would begin supplying medicines and health foods to the home-centre chain Shimachu, giving Sundrug’s own count at the end of March 2020 as 660 directly run stores and 64 franchise stores.

In 2020 the company was the subject of a regulatory order. On 24 June 2020 Japan’s Consumer Affairs Agency issued a cease-and-desist order to Sundrug under the Act against Unjustifiable Premiums and Misleading Representations, Diamond Chain Store Online reported. Newspaper flyers distributed by some directly run stores between July 2019 and January 2020 had shown discounts on 13 items measured against manufacturers’ suggested retail prices that were not set. The company put the error down to how it managed product information and said it had tightened that management from April 2020.

More recent moves concern partners. The company’s history records a capital alliance agreement with BCPE Knight Holdings Cayman in November 2023, and the Kansai drugstore operator Kirindo Group becoming an equity-method affiliate in February 2024. At the end of March 2026 Sundrug listed 886 directly run stores, 671 stores at subsidiaries and 37 franchise and other stores, with 8,429 staff including part-time workers.

For a design guide, Sundrug shows how a chain can hold several store names together with one sign style, a red fascia and katakana lettering repeated across a drugstore, a convenience hybrid and partner banners. Compare Matsumoto Kiyoshi, another Japanese drugstore built on a katakana name, and Welcia. For this guide we use a fascia red, shelf white and ink with a bold gothic sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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