Hamamatsu Photonics Brand Guidelines: From Hamamatsu TV to Kamiokande’s 20-Inch Tubes

A student of Takayanagi and a phototube workshop.

Hamamatsu Photonics comes from a city with a long link to television. Its founder, Heihachiro Horiuchi, studied electrical engineering at Hamamatsu Industrial High School, now part of Shizuoka University, under Kenjiro Takayanagi, the company says; English Wikipedia, citing The Daily Telegraph, calls Takayanagi “the father of Japanese television.” The company’s history says Horiuchi worked on night-vision tubes in Tokyo and Yamagata during the Second World War, and returned to Hamamatsu after it to use what he had learned about photoelectric devices.

In 1948 he set up the Tokai Electronics Laboratory in Hamamatsu. Its first orders were for phototubes, the company says, including the PV26, used to switch street lights on and off automatically from 1951. On 29 September 1953 Horiuchi founded Hamamatsu TV Co., Ltd. with Teruo Hiruma and Norio Hanyu, to turn optical technology into industrial products. Its first video camera product was an underwater camera built for a Mie University professor to observe fish reefs, the company says.

The firm moved from tubes into solid-state parts. It made its first semiconductor products, cadmium sulphide light cells, in 1958, when an order to adjust the brightness of television picture tubes started its first mass-production line, and in 1959 it succeeded in making photomultiplier tubes — light detectors sensitive enough to register very faint light — which it still calls its main products. The name changed to Hamamatsu Photonics K.K. in 1983. Its shares were registered on the second section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 1996 and on the first section in 1998, the company says; it is now on the exchange’s Prime Market.

Tubes in a mine, sensors at CERN.

Hamamatsu Photonics’ reputation outside industry rests on very large light detectors. The IEEE Milestone “20-inch Diameter Photomultiplier Tubes, 1979–1987,” recorded by the Engineering and Technology History Wiki, says the company began developing 20-inch tubes at its Toyooka Factory in 1979 at the request of physicist Masatoshi Koshiba, for Kamiokande-II, a 3,000-tonne water-filled detector in a mine in Gifu prefecture. The detector carried 1,071 of the tubes, and in 1987 it recorded a burst of neutrinos from the supernova SN1987A; the record says this earned Koshiba the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2002. The milestone plaque stands at the factory, and the company dates the dedication to 2014.

Dates differ slightly. The University of Tokyo’s Institute for Cosmic Ray Research, in a release of December 2015, says the 20-inch tube was first developed in 1981 by Hamamatsu Photonics with the university and the KEK research organisation. The same release says the inner wall of the larger Super-Kamiokande detector is lined with about 11,000 of the tubes, and that physicist Takaaki Kajita, a 2015 Nobel laureate in physics for work there, donated two of them to the Nobel Museum in Stockholm.

The company’s detectors appear in other large experiments. Hamamatsu Photonics says its silicon strip detectors, avalanche photodiodes and photomultiplier tubes were used at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in the research that detected the Higgs boson, for which François Englert and Peter Higgs received the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics, and English Wikipedia, citing The Japan Times, says its sensors helped confirm the particle’s existence; Wikipedia also says its CCD image sensors are used at the Subaru Telescope.

The business writer Hermann Simon named the company as an example of a “hidden champion” in his 2009 book Hidden Champions of the Twenty-First Century, English Wikipedia says. The company also says an imaging system it used for a single-photon version of Young’s double-slit experiment was named one of the Nikkan Kogyo Shimbun’s “10 Great New Products” of 1984, and that the same system earned an R&D Award from the American publication R&D Magazine.

How photonics makers present themselves.

Photonics companies sell things most people never see. Their lasers sit inside machine tools, their transceivers inside data-centre racks, and their detectors inside instruments, telescopes and physics experiments. So the way they present themselves leans on a small set of images that make light visible: a laser beam crossing a dark optical table, the glowing end of a fibre, a row of pluggable transceiver modules lined up for a switch, or a photomultiplier tube and a sensor chip photographed under studio light against black.

The catalogue matters as much as the advertisement. Many makers of optics and components publish long product catalogues of lenses, mirrors, mounts, filters, tubes and diodes, each part with a drawing, a part number and a page of specifications. That catalogue habit gives much of the sector a shared look: clean technical photography, plenty of white or black space, careful diagrams and an engineering sans or a restrained serif, with colour used sparingly, often for a single accent.

The trade shows are where the industry gathers in person. Photonics West, LASER World of PHOTONICS and OFC, the optical fibre communication conference, are among the events where companies show new lasers, modules and detectors, and their stands and press releases often borrow the same visual language of beams, fibres and glowing chips. Company histories also lean on science: makers of detectors and light sources often point to the research projects and observatories that have used their parts.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, what it has bought or sold and what it makes — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word. Pending deals are described as pending, with the date they were announced.

Still in Hamamatsu.

Hamamatsu Photonics remains a listed Japanese company headquartered in Hamamatsu, in Shizuoka prefecture, with Tadashi Maruno as president and chief executive since 2022, the company says. Its corporate profile lists its main product lines as photomultiplier tubes, imaging devices, light sources, opto-semiconductors, imaging and analysing systems, and laser equipment and components.

Its production in Japan includes the Toyooka Factory in Iwata, home of the electron tube division according to the IEEE Milestone record, and the company says it opened its Miyakoda Factory in 1994. It has also bought businesses abroad. The company says it acquired Energetiq Technology, a maker of light sources for semiconductor test equipment, in 2017; and in 2024 it acquired NKT Photonics of Denmark, renamed Hamamatsu Photonics A/S, which makes fibre lasers and photonic crystal fibres, and Fairchild Imaging, a maker of CMOS image sensors.

For a design guide, Hamamatsu Photonics shows how a component maker can be known through the science its parts made possible rather than through consumer products. Compare Ushio, another Japanese maker of lamps and light sources, and Zeiss, an optics maker with deep roots in scientific instruments. For this guide we use a deep indigo, a muted blue and a bronze with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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