Nojima Brand Guidelines: A 1959 Sagamihara Electrical Shop, Courts Asia and VAIO

A Hitachi dealer’s shop on the edge of Tokyo.

Nojima began in August 1959 in Sagamihara, a city in Kanagawa prefecture on the south-western edge of the Tokyo area. The company’s own history gives its original name as Nojima Denki Kogyosha; Japanese Wikipedia says it was founded by Kinuyo Nojima to sell electrical goods and was initially a member of Hitachi’s chain of local dealer shops. The appliance site Kaden Watch made the same point in April 2026, describing the young business as a Hitachi “chain stall,” the name used for the maker’s network of neighbourhood dealers.

The business was incorporated as a limited company, Nojima Denki Shokai, in April 1962, became a joint-stock company in 1982 and took the name Nojima in 1991, according to its history page. Through the 1970s and 1980s it built a reputation for audio and then for audio-visual and computer goods: the company says it opened a corner for separate audio components at a Sagamihara store in 1973 and an audio, video and computer shop at Sobudai, also in Kanagawa, in 1982. In 1983 it opened a store in Machida, its entry into Tokyo, and from then on, the company says, it concentrated roadside stores in Kanagawa and the Tama and Hachioji districts of western Tokyo. It reached Saitama in 1989 and Yamanashi in 1996.

Shares were registered for over-the-counter trading with the Japan Securities Dealers Association in December 1994. Nojima moved to the First Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange on 17 June 2016 and to the Prime market in April 2022, Japanese Wikipedia says. Its head office moved from Sagamihara to Yokohama in 2005 and, on 2 March 2026, to the Shinagawa Intercity complex in Minato, Tokyo, where its company profile now places it.

Phones, networks and a PC maker.

Mobile phones became a second business early. The company says it opened a phone shop gathering several carriers under one roof, called Denwa-kan, in 1994, and set up a phone-shop subsidiary in 1995. Japanese Wikipedia says it opened its own carrier shop in 1999 and later grew the business by buying carrier-shop operators, including ITX in 2015 and Conexio, which became a subsidiary in February 2023. It also opened a hi-fi business, audio Square, in 2004.

Acquisitions widened the group well beyond stores. On 1 April 2017 Nojima took over Nifty, the consumer internet business carved out of Fujitsu’s Nifty, Japanese Wikipedia says; Nifty in turn bought the mail-order business Cecile in 2021. Abroad, Nojima set up a subsidiary in Phnom Penh in 2013 and opened its overseas store in a shopping mall there in June 2014. On 18 January 2019 Marketing-Interactive reported that a subsidiary, Nojima Asia Pacific, had made a voluntary conditional cash offer for all the shares of COURTS Asia, the electrical and furniture retailer listed in Singapore, as Nojima looked to enter consumer-appliance retail in Southeast Asia, and that it would consider delisting the company. Courts Asia became a consolidated subsidiary through that offer on 15 March 2019, according to Japanese Wikipedia, and Nojima’s own history says it became wholly owned the same year. Japanese Wikipedia says Nojima’s Cambodian business closed in 2026, leaving Singapore and Malaysia as its overseas markets.

The newest step is manufacturing. On 6 January 2025 Nojima completed its purchase of about 93 percent of VAIO, the personal-computer maker that began as Sony’s PC business, PC Watch reported that day; the share-transfer agreement had been signed on 11 November 2024, and VAIO’s operating policy was to stay unchanged. On 21 April 2026 Nojima announced a deal for Hitachi’s home-appliance business, through a new jointly owned company in which Nojima would hold 80.1 percent and Hitachi Global Life Solutions 19.9 percent, with the Hitachi brand continuing, Kaden Watch reported two days later. That deal was announced in April 2026 and was not completed at the time of writing.

Roadside stores and own labels.

Japan’s big electronics, furniture and home-centre chains mostly grew from single regional shops, and their corporate pages still tell that story in the same order: a founding year and town, a founder, a date when the company was incorporated, and the dates when its shares were listed, now usually on the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s Prime Market. Many have since become holding companies, with the stores run by a subsidiary and the parent group named separately, so the name on the sign and the name on the share register are not always the same.

Store names carry much of the identity. Some groups keep a different name for each store format: Yamada Denki, for example, uses Tecc Land for its roadside stores, LABI for its large stores beside city stations and Tecc LIFE SELECT for stores that add furniture and household goods, according to Japanese Wikipedia. Others have done the opposite. Edion put four regional store names under one name, EDION, in October 2012, the company says.

The roadside store is the common type. Japanese Wikipedia describes Tecc Land buildings with the car park on the ground floor and the sales floors above, and Edion lists roadside stores alongside shopping-mall tenants and city stores. Point cards are part of the offer as well: Yamada tested its point system before rolling it out, and Edion has added several shared point programmes since 2015, Japanese Wikipedia records.

Own-label ranges are named plainly and sit beside the makers’ brands. Edion sells products under its e angle and e angle select names, and a line developed with the furniture retailer Nitori, while Yamada sells furniture under the IDC OTSUKA name after absorbing the retailer Otsuka Kagu in 2022. This guide sets out what can be checked about each chain, and marks what rests on the company’s own word.

Lower-case lettering and its own sales staff.

On its stores the name is written in lower-case Latin letters, “nojima,” Japanese Wikipedia notes, and the company calls the chain a digital home-electronics specialist. Its company profile lists the business as selling digital home-electronics products together with installation, repair and technical guidance, and names makers and phone carriers such as Panasonic, Hitachi, Sharp, Sony, Apple, NTT Docomo and KDDI among its main trading partners.

The company also runs a points scheme, the Nojima Super Point, earned through its smartphone app and usable in all its stores.

The store network remains concentrated around Tokyo. The company’s store pages group branches by prefecture across Kanagawa, Tokyo, Saitama, Chiba, Shizuoka, Yamanashi, Nagano, Ibaraki and Niigata as listed in November 2026. Since 2014 the company has also operated its own shopping mall, Nojima Mall Yokosuka, according to its history page.

For a design guide, Nojima shows a retailer that kept one plain lower-case name while its group came to take in internet, mail-order and computer businesses. Compare Yamada Denki, another Japanese electronics chain, and Bic Camera, the Tokyo station-front electronics retailer. For this guide we use a signal blue, a flyer red and showroom grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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