Cosmos Pharmaceutical Brand Guidelines: A Nobeoka Pharmacy Turned Drugstore Cosmos

A town pharmacy on the Miyazaki coast.

Cosmos Pharmaceutical traces itself to Uno Kaitendō Yakkyoku, a pharmacy that Masaaki Uno opened in Nobeoka, in Miyazaki Prefecture on the east coast of Kyushu, in February 1973, according to Japanese Wikipedia. NetIB-News, the Fukuoka business news site, also names the Kaitendō pharmacy that Uno founded in Nobeoka as the company’s predecessor, in a March 2016 report. The company itself was set up as a limited company, Cosmos Yakuhin, in December 1983 and became a joint-stock company in April 1991. It moved its head office to Miyazaki city in April 2000 and to Fukuoka in April 2005, Japanese Wikipedia says. Its shares were listed on the Mothers market of the Tokyo Stock Exchange in November 2004 and on the exchange’s First Section in May 2006.

In English the company writes its name as COSMOS Pharmaceutical Corporation; in Japanese it is Kabushiki Kaisha Cosmos Yakuhin. Its shops carry a different name again. Japanese Wikipedia says the store name moved from Drugstore Cosmos to Super Drug Cosmos and then Discount Drug Cosmos before returning to Drugstore Cosmos, while branches with a dispensing counter are called Cosmos Yakkyoku, or Cosmos Pharmacy.

The founder ran the company for more than four decades. In May 2017 NetIB-News reported that Uno would become chairman and that Futoshi Shibata, then head of corporate planning, would succeed him as president at the August 2017 shareholders’ meeting. In a February 2018 profile, the same publication wrote that Uno had built a single Nobeoka pharmacy into a drugstore chain across western Japan within one generation, and that by then the company had more than 3,500 full-time employees. Founded in 1973, the business has no pre-war history.

Big stores, food on the shelves, no point cards.

The NetIB-News profile of February 2018 set out the model plainly. Cosmos uses the margin on medicines to sell food and other daily necessities at low prices, and opens large numbers of stores in small trading areas of roughly 10,000 to 20,000 people. Its standard store then measured about 1,600 square metres. There were no point cards and no credit-card discounts, flyers were used to announce rather than to lure shoppers with specials, and the chain did not sell fresh food, which would have needed a different store system. The site also noted that Cosmos had made no mergers or acquisitions, unlike much of its industry. The large suburban format was still new in 1998, when, the profile says, the company had only just begun opening big drugstores outside town centres. NetIB-News linked the later growth to more dual-income households wanting to shop quickly close to home, and to shoppers’ preference for low prices during the long period of deflation.

Japanese Wikipedia fills in the history behind that model. The chain introduced a points scheme in 1994 and dropped it in 2003, switching to everyday low prices. It describes Cosmos as a typical example of the “food and drug” format: large suburban stores of 1,000 to 2,000 square metres that keep to staple goods and carry plenty of packaged food, while leaving out fresh produce and ready meals. Payment is mostly in cash, with credit cards limited to some stores, such as tax-free counters and dispensing sections. In January 2019 Toyo Keizai described the large suburban stores as stocking food on the scale of a supermarket.

The store map spread outward from Kyushu. According to Japanese Wikipedia, the first store outside Kyushu opened in Yamaguchi in March 2004, the first in Shikoku at Matsuyama in May 2005, the first in Kansai at Akashi in May 2010, the first in Chubu at Yokkaichi in November 2015 and the first in Hokuriku at Obama, Fukui, in May 2018. Toyo Keizai reported in January 2019 that the company had announced urban stores near stations in Hiroo, in Shibuya, and in Nakano; the Hiroo station store opened in April 2019, and NetIB-News reported in July 2019 that three Tokyo stores had opened in the year to May. By the end of May 2021 there were 25 stores in the Kanto region, NetIB-News reported that August, adding that the company had decided to move into prescription dispensing in earnest.

How Japanese discount stores, value-apparel chains and drugstores 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.

One store name, large boxes.

Cosmos keeps its range close to staples, and its own labels follow suit. Japanese Wikipedia names ON365 for food and StandarDay for household goods among its private brands. As of June 2024 the encyclopedia counted about 1,500 stores, spread across Kyushu, Chugoku, Shikoku, Kansai, Chubu and Kanto, and it says the store count passed 1,600 with the results for the year to May 2025, published in July 2025.

Much of the identity is the shop itself. In the NetIB-News account, the chain built a low-cost store operating system early so that it could open stores quickly, and it kept fresh food out because processing work did not suit fast, large-scale opening. The urban stores that followed from 2018, near stations in Fukuoka, Osaka and Hiroshima and then Tokyo, were a departure from the suburban format, Toyo Keizai reported in January 2019, aimed partly at visitors from abroad.

For a design guide, Cosmos Pharmaceutical shows how a drugstore can be recognised by format and pricing policy rather than by mascots or promotions. Compare Sundrug, another Japanese drugstore chain, and Welcia, another Japanese drugstore group. For this guide we use a Kyushu blue, a cosmos orange and an aisle white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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