Olympus Brand Guidelines: Takachiho’s Microscopes, the 1950 Gastrocamera and a Medical Turn

Microscopes, thermometers and a mountain of gods.

Olympus was founded in Tokyo on 12 October 1919 as Takachiho Seisakusho by Takeshi Yamashita, a lawyer who had worked for the trading company Tokiwa Shokai, the company says. Its aim was domestic production of microscopes. Its chief engineer, Shintaro Terada, had built microscopes in the 1910s and brought his equipment with him; the first microscope, the Asahi, went on sale in 1920, and the firm also made thermometers. Japanese Wikipedia places the first works in Hatagaya, in Tokyo’s Shibuya district, and says the thermometer business was transferred in 1923 to the maker that is now Terumo.

The name came early. The company says the Olympus brand was introduced in February 1921, chosen because Mount Olympus, like Mount Takachiho in Japanese mythology, is a home of the gods. Its first logo, though, read “TOKIWA TOKYO,” after the trading company that held a stake and handled sales. Olympus moved into photography in the 1930s: Japanese Wikipedia dates the first Zuiko lens and the first camera, the Semi-Olympus I, to 1936.

The company was renamed Takachiho Optical on 28 May 1942, when optical products had become its mainstay. Japanese Wikipedia records that in the war years it bought two former silk mills in Nagano prefecture, at Suwa at the end of 1943 and at Ina in spring 1944, and turned both into factories for military optics; work on a new camera was halted as demand for weapons production grew. In 1945 the Tokyo plant was evacuated to Suwa, and in May an air raid destroyed the head office and main factory. After the war ended in August, the company restarted with Suwa making cameras and Ina making microscopes. It became Olympus Optical Co., Ltd. on 1 January 1949.

The gastrocamera and the endoscope.

Olympus’s medical business began with a request. The company says that in 1949 a doctor at the University of Tokyo hospital asked it to develop a camera that could photograph the inside of the stomach, and that a first prototype followed in 1950, with a lens at the tip of a flexible tube and images taken on monochrome film. The company calls it the world’s first practical gastrocamera. Japanese Wikipedia says fibre optics were adopted in the gastrocamera in 1963. The logo on the GT-I and GT-II gastrocameras carried “OIC,” for Optical Industrial Company, in place of “TOKYO,” the company says.

Endoscopy then widened. The company’s milestones list a 1975 collaboration with Winter & Ibe on rigid surgical endoscopes, with Olympus supplying the optical systems, and an endoscopic video information system in 1985. English Wikipedia says Olympus bought the British maker KeyMed in 1987, and that its joint venture with Sony, Sony Olympus Medical Solutions, developed the 4K surgical endoscopy system Olympus sells as VISERA 4K UHD from 2015, followed by the VISERA ELITE III in 2022. The company lists the launch of its EVIS X1 endoscopy system in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and parts of Asia in 2020.

The cameras built a separate reputation. The Pen half-frame camera of 1959 and the compact OM system SLRs came from a design team led by Yoshihisa Maitani, according to English Wikipedia, and Olympus later developed the Micro Four Thirds system with Panasonic. Those cameras now belong to another company.

Scopes, towers and congresses.

Endoscopy and minimally invasive surgery are sold to a small, expert audience: surgeons, gastroenterologists, theatre nurses and the hospital teams who buy and reprocess equipment. The makers’ public image follows from that. A familiar picture in this field is the instrument itself, a slim scope coiled on a white ground or a rigid telescope laid out at full length, shown with little else around it, so that the length, the bend and the tip carry the image.

The second familiar picture is the operating theatre. Here the product is the system rather than the single instrument: a video tower of camera units and light sources beside the table, and a team of surgeons looking up at a screen rather than down at the patient. Some makers go a step further and present the whole room; Karl Storz, for example, showed its OR1 integrated operating room at the Medica trade fair in 1998, the company says. Close by sit macro shots of instrument tips, clips and jaws, where the detail is the subject.

Much of the communication happens face to face. Makers run training and visitor centres where clinicians handle equipment and practise techniques; Karl Storz says it opened a logistics and training centre in Tuttlingen in 1999. Congresses matter as much: Digestive Disease Week (DDW) in the United States, UEG Week in Europe and the annual meeting of the Society of American Gastrointestinal and Endoscopic Surgeons (SAGES) are where new scopes, generators and accessories are shown to the people who will use them.

The makers in this guide range from long-established German firms to younger companies elsewhere, and from full endoscope systems to single devices. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand: who founded it, who owns it and what it says about where its products are made, and it marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A medical company with an old camera name.

The modern company was shaken in 2011. BBC News reported in April 2014 that one of Japan’s biggest accounting scandals had come to light at Olympus in October 2011, when the chief executive turned whistleblower and investment losses hidden since the 1990s were revealed; three former executives were arrested in 2012, and six trust banks later sued over false financial statements covering 2000 to 2011. Olympus formally admitted on 8 November 2011 that losses had been deferred and concealed, according to Japanese Wikipedia, and its own milestones note the third-party committee formed in 2011 to investigate them.

Over the following decade Olympus narrowed to medicine. It had become Olympus Corporation on 1 October 2003. Its camera and audio business passed to OM Digital Solutions, majority-owned by Japan Industrial Partners, at the start of 2021, and its scientific business, carved out as Evident in 2022, was transferred to Bain Capital in 2023, according to English Wikipedia and the company. In 2024 it moved its head office from Shinjuku to Hachioji, in western Tokyo, which it calls its global headquarters.

Regulators have also acted. In a letter to health care providers updated on 20 October 2026, the US Food and Drug Administration said that, because of outstanding quality-system regulation violations, it had placed further Olympus devices made in Japan — including certain bronchoscopes, laparoscopes, enteroscopes and endoscope reprocessors — under an import alert that already covered models listed from June 2025; the agency also lists warning letters to Olympus companies dated 2022, 2023 and October 2026.

The identity has been steady. The company says the “OLYMPUS TOKYO” logo of 1921 is still in use, that a new logo was used from 1970 to 2000, and that since 2001 a yellow line beneath the name, the “Opto-Digital Pattern,” has formed the Olympus Communication Symbol.

For a design guide, Olympus shows how a century-old optics name can be narrowed to one field without changing the word on the product. Compare Evident, its former scientific business, and Pentax Medical, another Tokyo endoscope maker with camera roots. For this guide we use a deep blue, a warm yellow and white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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