Kyowa Kirin Brand Guidelines: Kyowa Hakko 1949, Kirin Pharma 2008 & a 2019 Name

Three drinks makers, a research institute and a postwar restart.

Kyowa Kirin’s roots lie in a partnership of drinks makers. Japanese Wikipedia, drawing on the company’s own 35-year history published in 1984, says that in 1936 the brewers Takara Shuzo, Godo Shusei and Dainippon Shurui Jozo formed a group called the Kyowa-kai, and in November 1937 set up the Kyowa Chemical Research Institute.

The war shaped that first venture plainly. Its main purpose, Japanese Wikipedia says, was research into making acetone, butanol and isooctane by microbial fermentation, products then in demand for military use. The operating company was renamed Kyowa Kagaku Kogyo in 1939; a related firm, Toa Kagaku Kogyo, was set up in 1943 and absorbed it in April 1945, and in November 1945 took the name Kyowa Sangyo. A production plant started in 1944, but abnormal fermentation held it back, and mass production only began in 1948. The sources used for this guide do not say whether forced or conscripted labour was used at its sites during the war.

The present company was founded on 1 July 1949 as Kyowa Hakko Kogyo, set up in Tokyo as a “secondary company” of Kyowa Sangyo under Japan’s postwar industrial readjustment plans, the company’s history says. Benzaburo Kato became its first president. Fermentation remained the base: the company says it brought in streptomycin production technology from Merck & Co. in 1951, and in 1956 isolated the anticancer drug Mitomycin C and developed a process for making L-glutamic acid by fermentation, which it calls a world first.

Drinks, chemicals and medicines, then a narrower focus.

For decades Kyowa Hakko was a broad fermentation business. Japanese Wikipedia records that it absorbed the maker of the synthetic sake Rikyu in 1955 and Nihon Shurui, maker of Dia shochu, in 1960, and moved into animal feed, food additives and chemicals. It made shochu and wine, including Sainte Neige wine from Yamanashi, until it moved its drinks business into a venture with Asahi Breweries in 2002 and later handed it over entirely. Its food business was split off in 2005 and its chemicals arm sold in 2011.

Medicines became the core. The company says it began full-scale work in pharmaceuticals in 1963 and launched the anticancer drug 5-FU in 1967 and Leunase in 1971. It names the erythropoietin drug ESPO, launched in 1990, and the G-CSF drug GRAN, launched in 1991, among its milestones. Antibodies followed: the company says it set up BioWa in the United States in 2003, and its antibody engineering platform, which it calls Potelligent, was used to develop mogamulizumab, approved in Japan in April 2012 under the name Poteligeo, English Wikipedia says.

The record is not only one of launches. In 1996 Kyowa Hakko Kogyo was one of four Asian companies that settled with the United States Justice Department’s Antitrust Division and pleaded guilty in the lysine price-fixing case, which concerned an animal-feed additive, English Wikipedia records.

Design history is thin but specific. In 1981 the company changed the written form of its name and introduced a corporate identity, with a symbol by the designer Ray Yoshimura based on a tortoise-shell pattern and expressing the harmony of its six divisions, Japanese Wikipedia says; the symbol was given a three-dimensional form in 2005. A 2001 newspaper advertisement about hay fever won the top prize in the advertisers’ section of the 69th Mainichi Advertising Design Awards, the same source says.

Design and documentation.

Japanese drug makers tend to present themselves through places and archives as much as through products. Research campuses carry much of the weight: Chugai began full operation of its Chugai Life Science Park Yokohama, in Kanagawa, in 2023, and earlier ran a research laboratory at Tsukuba, in Ibaraki, from 2001 to 2005; Otsuka Pharmaceutical opened an Osaka Research Center for Drug Discovery in 2022, according to the companies’ own timelines. Photographs of laboratories, glass façades and scientists at screens recur across their websites and reports.

History is the other recurring theme. Several of these companies trace their roots to the Meiji and Taisho eras, and their anniversary pages lean on archive photographs of early shopfronts, factories and founders, including the old medicine-trading streets of Doshomachi in Osaka. Chugai marked its 100th anniversary in March 2025 and the Otsuka group its centenary in 2021, and both publish detailed chronologies of how their names and symbols changed.

The visual language is mostly cool and clean. Blue and white dominate packaging and corporate marks: Chugai moved its corporate colour from green to blue in 2002, and Otsuka describes the large O of its group symbol in “Otsuka BLUE.” Alongside prescription medicines, many of these firms sell consumer products, such as health drinks, eye drops and nutrition bars, that put their names on pharmacy and convenience-store shelves; Otsuka’s Pocari Sweat, launched in 1980, is one example.

Trade shows complete the picture: booths at international partnering events such as BIO and at CPHI Japan show the companies to licensing partners and suppliers rather than to shoppers. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — its founding, its owners, its war years and its symbols — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A brewer’s pharmaceutical arm, joined to a fermentation house.

The Kirin connection came in two steps. In October 2007 Kyowa Hakko agreed a strategic alliance with the Kirin group; Kirin Holdings bought 28.49 percent through a friendly tender offer, and on 1 April 2008 Kyowa Hakko took over Kirin’s drug business, Kirin Pharma, through a share exchange, leaving Kirin with 50.10 percent, Japanese Wikipedia says. Kirin Brewery itself dates from 1907, the company notes. On 1 October 2008 the two companies merged as Kyowa Hakko Kirin, and the biochemicals business was spun off as Kyowa Hakko Bio.

The name was then simplified in stages. In 2016 the company rebranded its western subsidiaries as “Kyowa Kirin,” it says, and on 1 July 2019, its 70th anniversary, the parent changed its trade name to Kyowa Kirin Co., Ltd. That year Kirin Holdings took most of Kyowa Hakko Bio, English Wikipedia says. Today Kyowa Kirin is headquartered in Chiyoda, Tokyo, is a subsidiary of Kirin Holdings and is a member of the Nikkei 225 index. In March 2025 it appointed its first non-Japanese president, Japanese Wikipedia says.

The company has also grown abroad by acquisition. It bought the British company ProStrakan in 2011, and announced in 2023 the purchase of Orchard Therapeutics, a British company working in stem cell gene therapy, according to its own history.

On manufacturing, the company calls its Takasaki Plant its major biopharmaceutical manufacturing site. It says it completed the Q-TOWER analysis facility there in 2022 and the HB7 drug-substance building in 2025, and that in 2024 it decided to build a new biologics plant in North Carolina. Japanese Wikipedia adds a formulation plant completed at Ube in 2012.

For a design guide, Kyowa Kirin shows how a name can carry two histories at once. Compare Otsuka Pharmaceutical, with which it announced an alliance in 2012, and Astellas, another merged Japanese drug maker. For this guide we use a deep blue, white and a brick red with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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