A Western-cake shop beside Yokohama’s foreign settlement.

Fujiya began as a single shop. In November 1910 Rin’emon Fujii, who was born in Aichi Prefecture and had worked in Yokohama since his teens, opened a small Western-confectionery shop in Motomachi, Yokohama, close to the city’s foreign settlement; the company says he opened it on his 25th birthday. Western cakes were still a novelty in Japan, and the company says sales were slow at first. Japanese Wikipedia says the shop began selling Japan’s first Christmas cake that December, and English Wikipedia says Fujiya is credited with introducing the Christmas cake to Japan.

The name is a play on words. The company says Fujiya joins the founder’s surname, Fujii, with Mount Fuji, a mountain well known to foreign visitors, and with the characters 不二, “without equal” — the young founder’s wish to be second to none.

In 1912 Fujii travelled to the United States, returning the following year, and the company says what he saw there — confectionery sold in smart shops — shaped what came next: a modern cash register and a tea room with an American-style soda fountain at the Motomachi shop, which Japanese Wikipedia dates to 1914. A second shop opened in Isezakicho in 1922, where cream puffs and a shortcake the company says Fujii devised himself became specialities, and a Ginza shop followed in August 1923. The Great Kanto earthquake of September 1923 burned all three, Japanese Wikipedia says. In the late 1930s the Isezakicho shop was rebuilt as a six-storey reinforced-concrete building designed by the American architect Antonin Raymond, the company says; it traded as the Yokohama Center store until August 2023.

The business was incorporated in stages: a partnership in 1930 and, in 1938, the joint-stock company that is still the listed entity today, Japanese Wikipedia says. After the war the head office moved to Ginza, in 1946.

Peko-chan, Milky and a mark by Raymond Loewy.

Fujiya’s best-known face arrived in 1950. Peko-chan, a pigtailed girl licking her lips, first appeared as a shop-front doll, Japanese Wikipedia says, a year before the sweet she became tied to; a boy companion, Poko-chan, followed in 1951. The company’s Peko-chan pages say her name comes from “beko,” a north-eastern dialect word for a calf, and describe her as a forever six-year-old. English Wikipedia notes that life-size Peko-chan dolls stand outside the chain’s shops across Japan. On 19 June 1998 the Peko-chan and Poko-chan figures were registered as a three-dimensional trademark, following the Colonel Sanders statue of KFC Japan, Japanese Wikipedia says.

The sweet was Milky, a milk soft candy. After the war, the company says, Fujii rebuilt the firm’s factory at Numazu in Shizuoka Prefecture around a boiler that had survived the wartime fires, and that factory gave rise to Milky; Japanese Wikipedia, citing the Asahi Shimbun in 2020, says the candy was developed there and launched in 1951. Other long-lived lines followed: Parasol Chocolate in 1954, Look chocolate, whose 1962 pack the company still shows, and Fujiya Nectar, a peach juice drink, in 1964. Japanese Wikipedia lists Country Ma’am biscuits and Home Pie among today’s products and says Nectar is now sold through the drinks company Ito En.

The corporate mark came in 1961. As shops and restaurants multiplied after the war and hits such as Milky grew the business, the company says, it needed a mark that would be recognised anywhere in Japan, and the result was designed by the French-born American industrial designer Raymond Loewy. His “Family Mark” combines a letter F with an oval and petals; the company says the F stands for Fujiya and also for Familiar, Flower, Fantasy, Fresh and Fancy. Loewy also drew the gothic-style LOOK logo for Look chocolate, the company says. Japanese Wikipedia adds that in the 1960s Fujiya adopted industrial-engineering and corporate-identity methods, which fed a franchise chain whose first store opened in Fushimi, Kyoto, in October 1963.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all drink and sweet names from Japan: Kirin, Suntory, Pocari Sweat, Mitsuya Cider, Fujiya, Kabaya and Yamazaki. Japanese drink and sweet brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s name to names that now belong to much larger food and drink groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a vending machine or convenience store to a supermarket shelf.

A drink or sweet brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a pack, a name and the drink, snack or treat it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its products are actually made and packed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A listed confectioner inside the Yamazaki group.

Fujiya listed its shares in 1962 and built partnerships with foreign food companies, Japanese Wikipedia says: from 1973 it sold KitKat in Japan under a tie-up with Britain’s Rowntree Mackintosh, and in December 1973 it set up a joint venture with Baskin-Robbins that became the Thirty One ice-cream chain in Japan. A joint venture with PepsiCo, Fujiya Frito-Lay, ran from 1977 to 1990.

The founding family ran the company until 2007. In January that year Fujiya suspended production and sale of its Western confectionery after reports that out-of-date ingredients had been used, and president Rintaro Fujii resigned, CBC News and Japanese Wikipedia reported; Yasufumi Sakurai became the first president from outside the family. In March 2007 Fujiya agreed a capital and business alliance with Yamazaki Baking, the Tokyo bread maker, which took a 35% stake in April 2007 and 51% in November 2008, making Fujiya a subsidiary; Japanese Wikipedia gives Yamazaki’s holding as 54.3% at the end of 2021. Fujiya remains listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, and in July 2008 its head office moved from Ginza to Bunkyo, Tokyo.

Japanese Wikipedia lists nine Fujiya factories across Japan, from Sapporo in Hokkaido to Yoshinogari in Saga. The chain opened its first shop outside Japan, in Taipei, in 2016, English Wikipedia says, citing ETtoday. For the centenary in 2010 Peko-chan was given a new outfit, designed by students of Tokyo Mode Gakuen and chosen by shoppers’ votes at Takashimaya in Shinjuku, Sports Nippon reported; for Milky’s 70th year, in 2021, the company opened a shop called “milky70 since1951” at Sukiyabashi in Ginza.

For a design guide, Fujiya shows how a shop doll, a candy wrapper and a mark by Raymond Loewy can hold one brand together from 1950 to today. Compare Yamazaki Baking, its parent company, and Morinaga, another Tokyo confectioner. For this guide we use a Peko red, a milky cream and a ribbon pink with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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