Anritsu Brand Guidelines: Sekisansha 1895, a 1931 Merger & Optical and Wireless Test

A wired pioneer and a wireless pioneer.

Anritsu traces its history to 1895, when Sekisansha was founded in Japan to make wired communications equipment. Japanese Wikipedia and the company’s 2020 Integrated Report name its founder as Keizaburo Ishiguro. In 1908 Sekisansha merged with the Abe electric wire works to form Kyoritsu Electric Wire, which began mass-producing automatic telephones, Japanese Wikipedia says.

The second line began in 1900, when Tsunejiro Annaka set up Annaka Electric Works to build wireless equipment. Japanese Wikipedia says an Annaka-built Type 36 radio aboard the Shinano Maru sent the “enemy ships sighted” signal at the opening of the Battle of Tsushima in May 1905, and that in 1912 the firm completed its TYK wireless telephone, put into practical use in 1916. The company’s report calls it the first practical wireless telephone in the world. From 1924, as radio broadcasting began in Japan, Annaka made receivers, loudspeakers and headphones.

In March 1931 the two companies merged as Anritsu Electric. Japanese Wikipedia says the name was formed from one character of each: the “An” of Annaka and the “ritsu” of Kyoritsu. The new firm built Japan’s first television broadcast transmitter in 1933 for the Hamamatsu technical college and completed the country’s first domestically made automatic public telephone in 1939, Japanese Wikipedia says.

The war years. The company’s own history, in its 2020 report, describes 1931 to 1949 as a period in which the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War brought an era of war and a boom in military demand, followed after 1945 by a conversion to civilian demand to rebuild the business. The sources used for this guide do not say whether the company used forced or conscripted labour in the war years. In 1949 its radio receiver, meter and gramophone divisions were split off as separate companies, and in 1950 the company started again as a so-called second company under Japan’s postwar enterprise reconstruction law, Japanese Wikipedia and the report say.

Measuring the networks.

Postwar rebuilding tied Anritsu to Japan’s communications network. The 2020 report says it supported the expansion of communications infrastructure in the 1950s, opened a site at Atsugi in Kanagawa — today its head office — and later began exporting public telephones. Its shares were listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s second section in October 1961 and moved to the first section in August 1968, Japanese Wikipedia says.

Measurement became the core. The report lists test equipment for microwave links and for digital transmission, and says large deliveries of microwave link test equipment to AT&T built its business in the United States between 1975 and 1989. It also says Anritsu developed the world’s first optical time-domain reflectometer, or OTDR, used to test fibre-optic lines — 1981 in Japanese Wikipedia — and the report calls 1975 to 1989 the era of “Anritsu of light,” as optical measurement grew at home and abroad.

Two moves made it international. To mark its 90th anniversary in 1985 the company renamed itself Anritsu Corporation. In 1990 it bought Wiltron, a California instrument maker, which the report says brought microwave and millimetre-wave products, handheld instruments and overseas development, manufacturing and sales bases; Wiltron is now Anritsu Company, its American subsidiary, Japanese Wikipedia says.

Mobile networks followed. Japanese Wikipedia says Anritsu developed the first W-CDMA signalling tester in 2000 and the first W-CDMA conformance test system to gain GCF approval in 2003; the report adds LTE systems and the first GCF approvals for 5G protocol and RF conformance tests. Its ranges include spectrum and signal analysers, network analysers, the Signal Quality Analyzer bit-error-rate tester and the Access Master field tester for optical fibre. A separate business makes X-ray inspection systems, checkweighers and metal detectors for food production lines.

How the category presents itself.

Test and measurement companies sell instruments that most people never see, and their marketing is built around the screen. Product pages and brochures tend to lead with an oscilloscope display: a dark background, a fine grid of divisions and bright traces in yellow, cyan, magenta and green, each colour standing for a separate channel. The trace is the product’s face, so photographs are often cropped tight on the display rather than on the case around it.

The second familiar image is the laboratory. Signal and spectrum analysers, generators and power supplies appear stacked in racks or lined up on a bench, cables looping between front panels of knobs, soft keys and connectors. Engineers are shown probing a circuit board with a fine tip, reading a waveform while the device under test sits under a lamp or a magnifier. The tone is calm and technical, with product names and model numbers set in plain sans type.

Further along the chain, the pictures move into the factory. Semiconductor test makers show automated chip testers and handlers in clean production areas, staff in protective suits, and wafer probe cards photographed under magnification, where rows of needle-like contacts meet the pads of a chip. Network and wireless test companies favour antennas, fibre spools, base stations and phones in shielded boxes.

The category also meets its customers in person. Trade shows such as electronica in Munich, DesignCon in Santa Clara and Mobile World Congress in Barcelona are where new instruments are launched and demonstrated live, so stand design, demo screens and printed data sheets carry much of each brand’s visual identity. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — who founded it, who owns it and where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests on the company’s own word.

Atsugi, acquisitions and a redrawn mark.

Anritsu is a listed company with its head office in Atsugi, Kanagawa, where it moved in 2003; a new global head-office building was completed in 2015. Japanese Wikipedia says it was long an equity-method affiliate of NEC, and that NEC sold most of its shares in 2011.

It has grown through purchases abroad as well as at home. It bought NetTest of Denmark in 2005, which the report says brought a service-assurance business; Azimuth Systems of Massachusetts in 2016, for fading technology used in 5G testing; and Takasago, a Japanese maker of power supplies, in 2022, according to Japanese Wikipedia. In April 2025 it signed an agreement to buy DEWETRON, a measurement-systems maker in Grambach, Austria, from TKH Group, and completed the purchase on 21 October 2025, The Critical Communications Review reported.

Where it is made. Japanese Wikipedia lists manufacturing group companies: Tohoku Anritsu for communications equipment and instruments, Anritsu Devices for optical devices, Anritsu Ltd. in Britain, Anritsu A/S in Denmark and Anritsu Company in the United States, which develop and make instruments. It also records a Koriyama site opened in 2009 and a new building at the second Koriyama factory completed in 2022.

Identity. The name itself records the 1931 merger, one character from each founding company. Japanese Wikipedia says the symbol mark was partly changed in 2015, for the company’s 120th anniversary, for the first time in 30 years. The palette and type below are our own interpretation.

For a design guide, Anritsu shows how a name built from two older companies can carry a long history into fibre and mobile testing. Compare Advantest, another Japanese test maker, and Yokogawa, a Japanese measurement name. For this guide we use a deep teal, a fibre cyan and warm greys with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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