ARKRAY Brand Guidelines: Kyoto Daiichi Kagaku, 1960, and the GLUCOCARD Meters

Prisms and crystals in Fushimi.

ARKRAY began in Kyoto on 10 June 1960, when Tadashi Doi founded Kyoto Daiichi Kagaku in Fushimi Ward, according to the company’s history; Japanese Wikipedia gives the same month and place. It became a joint-stock company in September 1963, and in 1964 built a 300-square-metre factory at Mukaijima, also in Fushimi, and moved its headquarters there.

The young company made parts for analytical instruments rather than medical devices. The company says its first products, in 1960, were optical prisms for infrared spectrophotometers and detectors and precision components for analysers, including synthetic single crystals for infrared work, and that Shimadzu, the Kyoto instrument maker, gave it prizes in 1964 and 1969.

Diagnostics followed in the 1970s. The company dates its EYETONE blood-glucose meter to April 1970 and its RaBA-3010 rapid blood analyser to the same year; in 2015, it says, the RaBA-3010 was recognised in the fourth selection of Japan’s “Heritage of Analytical and Scientific Instruments.” Kyoto Daiichi Kagaku moved its headquarters to Minami Ward in 1971, opened a Tokyo sales office in 1975, set up its own direct sales and an international department in 1977, and built factories in Shiga Prefecture at Imazu, Kusatsu and Konan between 1978 and 1990, as both the company and Japanese Wikipedia record.

From EYETONE to GLUCOCARD.

Glucose testing runs through the company’s history. ARKRAY’s own account says EYETONE let glucose test strips developed in the United States be read in a small device; the first meters were about the size of two stacked video cassettes, with a needle gauge rather than a digital display, and a two-minute reaction after which the strip had to be washed and wiped. The company says EYETONE won grand prizes at trade shows in Leipzig in 1974 and Brno in 1975, and that in 1979 it agreed to supply the DEXTROMETER, a meter with a built-in microcomputer, for sale by Miles-Sankyo.

The change of method came at the start of the 1990s. The company records the GLUCOSCOT III of 1989 as its last colour-comparison meter and the GLUCOCARD GT-1610 of May 1991 as its first using an enzyme electrode, and describes an internal debate over which method to follow. Shigeru Doi became chief executive in May 1994, the company and Japanese Wikipedia record. GLUCOCARD has been its meter name ever since; the current range includes the S, W and Σ models, according to its website. In January 1995, after the Kobe earthquake, the company lent GLUCOCARD meters free of charge, its history and Japanese Wikipedia both say.

Abroad, the meters have been sold through ARKRAY’s own companies. In November 2009 News-Medical carried the company’s announcement that the US Food and Drug Administration had given 510(k) clearance to the GLUCOCARD Vital, to be distributed by ARKRAY USA; the announcement described ARKRAY as the world’s fifth-largest maker of diabetes self-monitoring systems. Some meters have come from partners: the Seoul maker i-SENS records a strip supply agreement with ARKRAY in 2010 and the launch of a meter product for it in 2011.

How diabetes device makers present themselves.

Diabetes device makers sell small things that people wear, carry or use many times a day: continuous glucose monitors worn on the upper arm or the belly, insulin pumps and tubeless patch pumps, blood-glucose meters with their test strips, and the pen needles and syringes used for injections. Their brand worlds are built around those objects, and increasingly around the data the objects produce.

A typical presentation pairs a close-up of a sensor or pump on skin with a phone screen showing a glucose graph and trend arrows. Apps and watch faces have become as central as the hardware: sensor makers describe readings sent wirelessly to phones, shared with family members and passed to insulin pumps, and that connection between devices is often the story the brand tells.

Photography in the category tends to be bright and active, with runners, swimmers, parents and children, while meter-and-strip brands lean on clean packshots of the meter, the strip pot and the lancing device. Regulation shapes the words as much as the pictures: product names come with indications, approval dates and age ranges, and marketing copy stays within what regulators such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration have cleared.

The industry meets at medical congresses such as the American Diabetes Association’s Scientific Sessions, the annual meeting of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD) and the ATTD conference on advanced technologies and treatments for diabetes, where new devices and study results are presented to clinicians. This guide sets out what can be checked about each maker — who founded it, who owns it, where it says its products are made and what regulators have said — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

An ark and a ray of light.

The name arrived in two steps. Kyoto Daiichi Kagaku introduced ARKRAY as a corporate brand in June 1995 and took it as the company name, ARKRAY, Inc., in June 2000. The company explains the word as a joining of “ark,” for Noah’s ark as a symbol of life, and “ray,” for brilliance, together meaning “radiance of life”; its Japanese corporate message is “Inochi, kagayaku, kagaku,” roughly “life, shining, science,” Japanese Wikipedia says. The company changed its logo in June 2010 to mark its 50th anniversary.

Today ARKRAY is based in Kyoto’s Nakagyo Ward, where it moved its headquarters in March 2025. Beyond glucose meters, it makes the ADAMS A1c analysers — the company says its Hi-AUTO A1c of 1981 was the world’s first automatic glycohemoglobin analyser — as well as AUTION urine analysers, SPOTCHEM point-of-care chemistry systems and, since 2014, a veterinary line under the name thinka. The company also says it proposed glycated albumin as a diabetes monitoring indicator with its GAA-2000 analyser of 1992, and in 1997 launched the Lactate Pro, a simple blood-lactate analyser. Sales companies followed abroad: ARKRAY Europe in the Netherlands in 2004, ARKRAY America in Minneapolis in 2006 and, in 2021, sales offices in Italy, Spain, Portugal, the United Kingdom and Belgium. Its history lists production companies in Shanghai, the United States, the United Kingdom, the Philippines and Ireland, a joint venture in India from 2007 and a capital alliance with the Korean test maker Boditech Med in 2013. Japanese Wikipedia notes that ARKRAY ran the operating company of the Kyoto Hannaryz basketball club as a wholly owned subsidiary until June 2022.

For a design guide, ARKRAY shows how an instrument-parts maker rebuilt its identity around a coined word with a story of its own. Compare i-SENS, the Seoul strip maker that has supplied it, and Ascensia Diabetes Care, another maker of glucose meters. For this guide we use an indigo, a warm amber and paper white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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