Mos Burger Brand Guidelines: Narimasu 1972, the Rice Burger and the Green Signboard

A test shop under a station.

Mos Burger started small. The company says it opened a test shop at Narimasu, in Tokyo’s Itabashi ward, in March 1972; Japanese Wikipedia puts it in the basement of a shopping arcade by Narimasu station on the Tobu Tojo line and gives its size as 2.8 tsubo, under ten square metres. The first full Mos Burger opened near the station’s south exit that June, and the company, then written Mos Food Service, was set up in July 1972 with its founder, Satoshi Sakurada, as president. It took its present name, Mos Food Services, in July 1984.

Sakurada came from finance. English Wikipedia says he worked at Nikko Securities’ Los Angeles branch in the early 1960s, where he often ate at Original Tommy’s, the chili-burger stand, and decided to adapt its cook-to-order approach in Japan; Japanese Wikipedia says he left Nikko with a colleague to start the business and that Tommy’s was its model. Japanese Wikipedia says the chain still cooks after the order is placed, a method it calls “after order.”

The name is explained as a backronym. Japanese Wikipedia says MOS stands for Mountain, Ocean and Sun — to be noble like a mountain, broad-hearted like the ocean and tireless like the sun — and that Sakurada’s earlier company, Mos, also read the letters as Merchandising Organizing System. Verdict Food Service repeated the Mountain, Ocean and Sun meaning in 2024.

Growth came through franchising. The first franchised restaurant opened at Shinmizu in Nagoya in November 1973; the chain reached 100 restaurants with a store on Shodoshima island in January 1979, opened its first drive-through at Makiminato in Okinawa in 1986 and reached all 47 prefectures that June, the company’s timeline records. Its shares were registered over the counter in 1985 and listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 1988.

Teriyaki, rice buns and a change of colour.

Two products define the menu. The Teriyaki Burger went on sale in May 1973, the company says, and in 2023 it named 15 May “Teriyaki Burger Day” for the burger’s 50th year. The Mos Rice Burger, which uses pressed rice in place of a bun, was launched in December 1987; English Wikipedia says the rice is mixed with barley and millet. Later lines include the Mos Plant-Based Green Burger of 2020.

The look of the chain has changed more than once. Japanese Wikipedia says the early logo was a yellow M on red, close to McDonald’s, until the early 1990s, when the M became white. From 2004 the company began replacing its red signboards with green ones and refitting restaurants with wood-toned interiors; the first of these “green Mos” stores opened at Shinbashi in February 2004, and the red and green labels were later dropped as all signboards turned green, the same source says. It adds that the logo was simplified with a brighter green in 2013, and simplified again in October 2024, when stores adopted a green M on black with the name shortened to “MOS.”

Characters have changed with the logo. AdverTimes, the advertising trade site of the publisher Sendenkaigi, reported on 16 February 2022 that for its 50th anniversary on 1 April 2022 the company would replace “Mossan,” its character since 2009, with LilMos, a new figure based on “Mos-boya,” the boy character from the founding years, and wearing his top hat with the logo. Art direction came from the company’s own corporate brand strategy department and the character design from the studio DIPE, AdverTimes said. For the anniversary, the company says, Narimasu station was briefly renamed “Narimosu” in March 2022.

Design and documentation.

Japan’s fast-food and conveyor-sushi chains present themselves first through the shop itself. A beef-bowl shop is often a single counter with stools, a curry or noodle shop a short line from order to tray, a sushi restaurant a lane of plates running past the tables. Many chains also run suburban roadside stores with car parks, table seating and drive-throughs, and units in station buildings and shopping-centre food courts, so the same name has to work on a tall roadside sign and on a narrow arcade front.

Ordering is part of the look. Many shops ask customers to buy a ticket from a machine before they sit down, and the machine’s screen, buttons and photographs become a menu in their own right; newer stores add self-checkout and mobile ordering. Conveyor-sushi chains add a piece of equipment of their own: the lane that carries plates past the seats.

Naming is usually plain. Signboards tend to state the dish as well as the name, and menus describe a bowl by what is on it, such as cheese, grated radish, kimchi or spring onion and egg, often in sizes from small to extra large. Some chains keep a word of their own for a familiar dish, and many publish their menus in English and Chinese for visitors.

Behind the shop front sits a listed company. Most of the large chains belong to parent groups listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange that run several formats under separate names, and their corporate sites publish company histories, store counts and overseas subsidiaries year by year. Those pages, read alongside Japanese and English press, are the clearest record of when a chain opened its first store, when it went abroad and who owns it now.

From Narimasu to Asia.

Mos Burger went abroad from the end of the 1980s. Japanese Wikipedia dates its earliest overseas restaurant to a Hawaii store in December 1989, closed in 2005. The company’s timeline lists Taipei in February 1991, Singapore’s Orchard Road in May 1993, Hong Kong in 2006, Bangkok in 2007, Seoul in 2012 and Quezon City in the Philippines in February 2020. Japanese Wikipedia says Taiwan had 303 Mos Burger restaurants in 2022. QSR Media reported in August 2024 that, as of 31 March 2024, the chain had 1,313 restaurants in Japan and 452 overseas.

Not every market lasted. Mos Burger opened in Australia at Sunnybank, in Queensland, in April 2011. In August 2024 it announced that it would close all three of its Australian restaurants, at Sunnybank, Southport and Upper Mount Gravatt; its last day of trading in Australia was 31 August 2024, Verdict Food Service and QSR Media reported, and it gave no reason.

Mos Food Services remains a listed company. It moved its head office from Shinjuku to Osaki, in Shinagawa, in 2007, signed a capital and business tie-up with Duskin in February 2008, and from 2010 opened shared “MOSDO!” shops with Mister Donut. Its other formats have included the Mother Leaf tea shops and the Japanese restaurant AEN, both begun in 1999, and Mos Premium. In July 2026 it completed the purchase of the Japanese restaurant company B.Y.O., and in August 2026 it launched a frozen-food brand, MOS Deli, the company says. Its shares have traded on the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s Prime Market since April 2022.

For a design guide, Mos Burger shows how a chain can change its colour and its mascot while keeping its three-letter name. Compare McDonald’s, whose red and yellow the early Mos logo resembled, and CoCo Ichibanya, another Japanese chain that refitted its restaurants in the 2000s. For this guide we use a leaf green and a tomato red with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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