Junkudo Brand Guidelines: A 1976 Kobe Bookshop, a Reversed Name and Library-Style Shelves

A Motomachi shop, a move to Sannomiya and a father’s name turned round.

Junkudo began in Kobe, though not under that name. Japanese Wikipedia says the company was set up on 22 June 1963 as Daido Shobo, a bookshop on Motomachi-dori in what was then Ikuta ward. The shop was opened by the father of the founder, Yasutaka Kudo, who had joined his father’s book-distribution business and was then given the bookshop to run on his own. The group’s own history page gives the same 1963 start in Motomachi.

The name came in 1976, when the business moved to the Sannomiya Center-gai shopping arcade. The company dates the birth of the Junkudo shop to 24 December 1976, and the Asahi Shimbun reported in October 2026 that the Motomachi shop moved and reopened in the arcade that year. Japanese Wikipedia tells the naming story: the founder put several names to his father, who turned them all down, so he reversed his father’s name, Jun Kudo, and the father liked the result. The company’s anniversary site says the same thing more briefly: the name joins the “Jun” and the “Kudo” of the founder’s father.

Growth came store by store. A second shop, the Sanpal store, opened in 1982 near Sannomiya station as a large specialist-book shop with a café corner, Japanese Wikipedia says; Kyoto followed in 1988. In November 1996 a Namba store in Osaka opened with the chain’s first sit-down reading corner. The company’s anniversary pages recall a staff line from that period that welcomed sitting to read and banned reading on your feet, and a joke that the high shelves needed a mountaineering club.

Tokyo came in 1997, with a store of about 1,000 tsubo in Ikebukuro and another in Sendai. The Osaka Honten opened in the Dojima Avanza building in 1999, and in 2001 the Ikebukuro shop roughly doubled to about 2,000 tsubo and became the Ikebukuro Honten. A tsubo is about 3.3 square metres.

DNP, Maruzen and a merged company.

Ownership changed in 2009. Japanese Wikipedia says Dai Nippon Printing (DNP) signed a capital tie-up on 18 March 2009 and took 51% of the shares; later that year Junkudo agreed a business tie-up with DNP and Maruzen and joined CHI Group, the holding company formed by Maruzen and Toshokan Ryutsu Center, now called Maruzen CHI Holdings. A share exchange made Junkudo a wholly owned subsidiary on 1 February 2011.

The two shop chains came together on 1 February 2015, when Maruzen Shoten absorbed Junkudo and the company took the name MaruzenJunkudo Bookstores. Japanese Wikipedia notes that the Maruzen and Junkudo shop names were kept. Joint stores had already appeared under a double name: a MARUZEN & Junkudo store opened in Shibuya in 2010, and a MARUZEN & Junkudo Umeda store of about 2,060 tsubo opened in Osaka’s Chayamachi that December. The company’s profile page lists Maruzen CHI Holdings as its shareholder, with its head office in Tokyo, and names group firms including a separate Junkudo shop company and Taiwan Junkudo.

Taiwan is the chain’s overseas outpost. Japanese Wikipedia says a Taipei Tianmu store opened in the Pacific SOGO department store in May 2009, a second store in the SOGO Zhongxiao branch followed in 2010 and closed in 2015, and a store on Guangfu South Road opened in May 2015. The chain also writes its name as 淳久堂.

Not every opening lasted. Japanese Wikipedia records that the Shinjuku store, opened in 2004 inside the Shinjuku Mitsukoshi Alcott building, closed on 31 March 2012 when that building shut, after Junkudo and the building’s owner could not agree terms for it to stay. As of October 2026, the Asahi Shimbun reported that the chain and its sister brands ran more than 100 stores in Japan and abroad.

Design and documentation.

Japan’s second-hand, hobby, book and sports chains tend to present themselves through the store itself before any logo. Many of them grew from a single shop, and their corporate pages often open with that first branch, the town it stood in and the year it opened, followed by a timeline of new formats, franchise agreements and listings on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

In second-hand retail, the buying counter is as much a part of the identity as the sales floor. Chains publish what they buy, how customers can bring goods in or send them by post, and which stores take which categories, from books and CDs to trading cards, toys, clothing and electronics. Some run separate buying-only centres or online services alongside their shops, and describe these on the same corporate pages as their stores.

Hobby and collector chains lean on display and naming. Shops are often split into small rooms or annexes, each with its own name and a single subject, such as manga for one readership, vinyl figures or vintage toys, so that a sign at the door tells a visitor what lies inside. Book chains, by contrast, describe long aisles, broad stock and space to browse, and some have used bright lighting and open layouts to make used books look like new retail. Mascots and capitalised store names appear on signs, bags and advertising.

Behind the shop fronts sit corporate structures that the companies set out in plain terms: founders, holding companies, parent groups, franchisees and shareholders, along with overseas stores that opened, moved or closed. The guides in this group follow those published histories, and treat colours and typefaces as an unofficial interpretation rather than an official brand standard.

Tall shelves, seats and a fiftieth birthday.

Junkudo’s look is its shelving. Japanese Wikipedia describes the chain’s approach as a full range in every subject, with many stores over 1,000 tsubo, sites a little away from the main stations aimed at shoppers who come on purpose, and a library-style layout of tall vertical bookcases rather than flat display tables, which it says is thought to have influenced other booksellers. Some stores add chairs, desks or an open café. In Kobe and Osaka, the stationer Nagasawa runs pen and notebook counters inside Junkudo stores as a tenant.

The company tells its own story in the same terms. Its fiftieth-anniversary history says that, as a late arrival from Kobe with no famous name, it chose to stock specialist books in depth and to let staff stay with one subject for years; it also records that the in-house bulletin Hon no Shirube reached its 500th issue in August 2020.

The anniversary in 2026 turned the shop’s own furniture into the theme. The company sold a tote bag printed with its book-cover pattern, a T-shirt carrying an old logo and a keyring shaped like Kobe’s Port Tower, and ran a public vote on a new original book cover. The Asahi Shimbun reported limited reissues of Kobe titles, including an essay collection by the Kobe-born novelist Chin Shunshin, and goods made with Myakumyaku, the Expo 2025 mascot, dressed in a bookseller’s apron. The Ikebukuro Keizai Shimbun reported in June 2026 on an all-night event, the Midnight Junclub, held from the night of 22 August into 23 August in the Ikebukuro, Osaka and Naha stores, with talks, a bookseller-for-a-night programme and silent reading; the paper noted that the chain had run after-hours “live in the bookshop” tours nine times since 2014.

For a design guide, Junkudo shows how a bookseller can make the shelf itself the identity: tall stacks, a seat, a paper cover and a name taken from the family. Compare Kinokuniya, another large Japanese bookshop chain, and Tsutaya. For this guide we use a deep green, cream and a warm tan with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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