A rented corner in Osaka and a borrowed family name.

Kubota began as a foundry in Osaka. The company’s corporate history says its founder, born Gonshiro Ohde, came to Osaka from the countryside, served apprenticeships at casting works and, in February 1890, rented one corner of an old tenement house and started Ohde Casting. Its first products, the company says, were castings for weighing equipment — fittings and weights for balances — and everyday goods such as pans and kettles. WIPO’s IP Advantage case study, last updated in July 2021, likewise dates the company to 1890 and describes it as beginning life as a foundry.

The family name came later. By the company’s account, one of Ohde Casting’s customers was Toshiro Kubota, a maker of match-making machinery, who asked the founder to become his adopted son. Gonshiro accepted on condition that he could continue his work on iron pipe, took the Kubota surname, and renamed the business the Kubota Iron Works. The company places the renaming in the section of its history covering 1897, the year it says its joint-type casting method made the mass production of iron pipe possible.

Iron pipe for waterworks became the core of the early business. Kubota says Japan relied on imported water pipe when the founder set out to make it at home, and that his casting methods of 1897, 1900 and 1904 let the company produce it in quantity. A Kubota statement reprinted by the British trade paper Farmers Guide in April 2020 also traces the company to iron pipelines for waterworks.

Machinery followed. The Farmers Guide report says Kubota began producing kerosene-driven engines for agricultural and industrial use in 1922, and the company says it made a cultivator in 1947.

From pipe to tractors and excavators.

Kubota’s tractors date from 1960. The company says it developed and commercialised the T15 that year, a rider-driven tractor for dry-field farming, as Japanese agriculture mechanised and rural workers moved to the cities. In 1953, by its account, it had changed its Japanese name to Kubota Tekko K.K. and set up a construction-machinery business, and the 2020 Farmers Guide report says Kubota introduced its own compact mini excavator in 1974.

The company is still based in Osaka. English Wikipedia describes Kubota Corporation as a publicly listed company headquartered in Osaka’s Naniwa ward and traded on the Tokyo Stock Exchange; its products range from tractors, combine harvesters and rice transplanters to construction machinery, engines, iron pipe, valves, pumps and water-treatment equipment.

Manufacturing reaches well beyond Japan. Kubota’s history says it established Kubota Manufacturing of America in Georgia in 1988, with production starting in April 1989, and the Farmers Guide report says Kubota had set up a manufacturing and sales operation in China by 1998. English Wikipedia says the US marketing and distribution company, Kubota Tractor Corporation, is headquartered in Grapevine, Texas, and that Kubota Manufacturing of America is based in Gainesville, Georgia.

The company renamed itself for its centenary. Kubota’s history says that in 1990, a hundred years after its founding, it changed its name to Kubota Corporation — dropping the old reference to casting works — and introduced a new corporate symbol and visual identity system.

Its range today runs from small engines to concept machines. WIPO’s case study says the designs for Kubota’s concept “Dream Tractor,” an automated, electric, remotely monitored machine, were released in 2020, and English Wikipedia lists turf equipment, utility vehicles and compact loaders among the company’s products.

Paint, decals and the dealer’s sign.

On farm and construction machinery, colour does a great deal of the identity work. A paint scheme carried across tractors, loaders and implements lets a machine be recognised across a field or a building site long before any badge can be read, and several equipment makers have treated their paint as a protected part of the brand, defending it as trade dress in the same way other companies defend a wordmark.

The decal is the second layer. Model numbers, wordmarks and stripes are usually applied as vinyl decals rather than cast badges, which is why restorers and collectors pay close attention to reproduction decal sets, and why a change of decal style often marks a new generation of machine as clearly as any change in the metal underneath.

Dealer signage carries the same identity to the roadside. Pole signs, fascia panels and branded service vans repeat the colours and wordmark at a scale meant to be read from a passing vehicle. Operator manuals, parts catalogues and safety labels then carry the typography and colour into the cab and the workshop, where the brand is read most often of all.

An oval K, a wordmark and one orange.

Kubota’s mark is described in WIPO’s IP Advantage case study, last updated on 1 July 2021. It says all of Kubota’s machinery products — tractors, combine harvesters, rice transplanters and construction machinery — carry the corporate logo: the word “Kubota” and an oval with a letter K in it. The case study says Kubota has used design to strengthen the value of its brand, adopting a “family look” strategy with a unified design and an orange colour palette used across all of its products.

The same study describes how the company protects that look. It says Kubota traditionally registered its designs first with the Japan Patent Office and then abroad, and that as its business in Europe grew it turned to WIPO’s Hague System for international design registrations, mainly designating the European Union. Shinobu Nakanishi of Kubota’s IP department told WIPO that the company uses its design rights “as a countermeasure against imitation.” The study also illustrates the design of a graphical user interface for Kubota construction machinery as one of the registered designs.

The words that go with the mark are a brand statement. WIPO quotes the Kubota Group’s line “For Earth, For Life,” with the company’s explanation that it promises to support the prosperous life of people while protecting the environment, and Kubota announced a group-wide set of corporate principles called the “Kubota Global Identity” in October 2012. The 1990 symbol and identity system, by the company’s account, marked its centenary and its change of name to Kubota Corporation.

For a design guide, Kubota shows how a company that began by casting balance weights and water pipe can tie tractors, excavators and engines together with one colour and one oval mark. Compare Bobcat, another compact-equipment brand, and New Holland, another tractor brand in this round. For this guide we use orange, iron black and paper with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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