Tsukumo Shokai, 1870.

Mitsubishi began on the water. Wikipedia says the company was established as a shipping firm by Iwasaki Yatarō in 1870, two years after the Meiji Restoration, under the name Tsukumo Shokai. DirectIndustry, in a “Behind the Logo” feature published on 25 August 2025, gives the same starting point: Mitsubishi was originally established as a shipping company, and ships were the backbone of its early commercial ventures.

The name came later. Wikipedia says the firm was renamed Mitsubishi Shokai in 1873; Mitsubishi Electric’s history of the logo says only that records suggest the Mitsubishi company name was settled on after the mark. Either way, the word is a compound. “Mitsu” means three, and “hishi” means water caltrop, and by extension a rhombus. In compounds the “h” softens to a “b”, a sound change Wikipedia identifies as rendaku, which is how mitsu and hishi become Mitsubishi. The name is usually translated as “three diamonds”, and DirectIndustry says that literal translation explains the logo’s three red rhombuses.

The business grew outward from the ships. Wikipedia describes a series of related steps: coal mining to supply fuel for the fleet, a shipbuilding yard bought from the government to repair the company’s own vessels, an iron mill to supply that yard and a marine insurance business to serve the shipping trade. Later diversification took the organisation into banking, warehousing, trade, paper, steel, glass, electrical equipment and real estate. DirectIndustry lists the same broad spread, from vehicles and heavy machinery to shipbuilding, energy, chemicals, electronics and financial services.

The family stayed at the head of the firm for decades. In 1894, Wikipedia says, Hisaya Iwasaki succeeded his uncle Yanosuke as president, and in 1916 Hisaya was succeeded by his cousin Koyata, who reorganised the group by spinning off its departments as subsidiaries. In 1917 Koyata funded the establishment of an optics company that later became Nikon, Wikipedia adds.

Two crests, one flag.

The three diamonds started life on a flag. Mitsubishi Electric’s account of the logo says that in the 1870s Tsukumo Shokai used a triangular water-caltrop icon on its ships’ flags, and that the present three-diamond mark grew from that icon. The company says the design is derived from two family crests: the three-layer water-caltrop crest of the Iwasaki family, Yatarō’s own, and the three-leaved oak crest of the Yamauchi family, the lords of the Tosa domain.

The Tosa link is the one independent writers stress. Wikipedia explains that the “three” in the name recalls the three oak leaves of the crest of the Yamauchi, the Tosa family that ruled over Yatarō’s birthplace and employed him. DirectIndustry says the symbol is directly inspired by the mon, or family crest, of the Tosa clan, which Iwasaki served, and describes mon as heraldic emblems carried by samurai families to represent their lineage. In other words, the mark takes the number three from the domain Iwasaki worked for and the diamond shape from his own family.

The arrangement is simple: three rhombuses meeting at a point, arranged in a triangle. DirectIndustry describes it as three red diamonds in a triangular formation and says the logo has remained consistent since its creation in the nineteenth century, whether displayed on a ship, a car or a piece of industrial equipment. It also offers a reading of its own, that the three diamonds can be interpreted as standing for maritime, commercial and industrial activities; that is the magazine’s interpretation rather than an official meaning.

The red has not always been used everywhere. Mitsubishi Electric says that in 1985 it introduced a “Blue MITSUBISHI” logo for use in Japan, to give itself some individuality within the group, while overseas it paired the red three-diamond symbol with the plain word “MITSUBISHI”. In 2014, the company says, its businesses in Japan began using the red three-diamond logo that had previously been used only overseas.

Founders, flags and a shared name.

Corporate names in East Asia often carry a meaning of their own. A company may take its name from a word for a mood or a hope, from a line of classical poetry, or from a folk tale known well beyond the region, and that meaning is then repeated in speeches, annual events and advertising. The name works as a small story that customers can retell.

Mascots are another recurring device. A drawn animal or character can stand in for a service that has no physical product, appearing on screens, plush toys, packaging and office signage, and it can stay in use long after the logo beside it has been redrawn.

For businesses that live inside phones, the app icon is frequently the version of the identity that people see every day. Icons are reduced to a single closed shape and one or two colours so they remain legible at fingertip size, while the full wordmark is kept for larger formats.

Campaign naming built on calendar dates is a further pattern: a day and month written as numbers become the name of an annual event, which can be printed, counted down and repeated every year.

One mark, many companies.

Today there is no single Mitsubishi company. The unified Mitsubishi organisation was dissolved after the Second World War under the Allied occupation’s policy towards the zaibatsu, Wikipedia says, and the former constituent companies continue to share the Mitsubishi brand and trademark. So the same three diamonds appear across businesses that are run as separate companies, from vehicles and machinery to banking and property.

Each company tells the story slightly differently, which is part of the brand’s character. Mitsubishi Electric, founded in 1921 when Mitsubishi Shipbuilding spun off a factory in Kobe to make electric motors, keeps a detailed timeline of its own wordmarks. It says its official company name and typeface were decided in 1955, using a lettering style it calls Mitarashi-ryu, which it used until 1963. Its slogans have changed with the decades: “Advanced and Ever Advancing” in 1968 and “Changes for the Better” from 2001, the year of its eightieth anniversary.

The mark itself has outlasted every slogan. DirectIndustry calls it a samurai family crest reimagined as a corporate visual identity, and the wordmarks beside it have changed, as Mitsubishi Electric’s own timeline shows. The real estate holdings in Tokyo’s Marunouchi district, acquired in 1890, were spun off in 1937 as Mitsubishi Estate, Wikipedia says, one of several group companies that took the name in the twentieth century.

For a design guide, Mitsubishi shows how a symbol taken from heraldry can serve many different businesses at once, while each company keeps its own wordmark and slogan beside it. Compare Toshiba, another Japanese electrical maker with a red wordmark, and Hitachi, whose name and mark also date from its founding. For this guide we use red, a deep red and ink with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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