Ono Pharmaceutical Brand Guidelines: Fushimiya Ichibei of 1717, a Crane on the Roof & Opdivo

A Doshomachi apothecary, 1717.

Ono Pharmaceutical dates its history to 1717, when the first Ichibei Fushimiya, aged 20, opened a shop called Fushimiya Ichibei in Doshomachi, Osaka’s medicine-trading street, with the help of the merchant to whom he had been apprenticed. The company believes the shop worked mainly as a branch or subcontractor of that mentor for its first five years; in 1722 Ichibei opened his own independent shop in a rented building, and he first appears in the registry of the street’s drug brokers’ guild in 1735. English Wikipedia also gives 1717 as the start of the business.

The company ties its founding family to the regulation of the trade. In 1722 the Tokugawa shogunate set up drug-testing offices in five cities to keep counterfeit medicines off the market, and Osaka’s office was placed in Doshomachi; the company says its first head was reportedly the first Ichibei Fushimiya. An 1849 Osaka guidebook illustrates the Fushimiya Ichibei shop.

A crane gave the business its house story. On 22 October 1848, the company says, quoting a local chronicle, a crane alighted on the drying platform on the shop’s roof on a shrine festival day; the sixth Ichibei asked the shogunate for permission to keep it, and the bird was later enshrined as Chitose Myojin, a shrine now on the roof of the original head office. A four-panel folding screen of the scene, The Coming of the Crane, belongs to the company.

In the Meiji era, the company says, Ichibei Ono joined fellow Doshomachi merchants, among them Chobei Takeda and Gohei Tanabe, in founding Dainippon Pharmaceutical, a jointly owned manufacturer with a drug-testing department. In 1934 Ichibei Ono VIII replaced the old shop name with Ono Ichibei Shoten, a general partnership, and expanded marketing as a wholesaler supplying regional retailers, chiefly in the Chugoku and Shikoku regions.

The company covers the war years briefly. As the war spread, it says, the economy came under government control and the National Mobilization Law put medicines under distribution control; Yuzo Ono, later Ichibei Ono IX, rented a factory to begin manufacturing and recalled in a memoir that new drug development was not quick or easy. The company says Ono Ichibei Shoten escaped war damage and resumed business promptly after the war. The sources used for this guide do not say whether forced or conscripted labour was used in those years.

From tonics to an antibody.

The modern company was formed in two steps. In 1947 the business set up Nippon Yukikakou to make medicines and Nippon Rikagaku Kogyo to make glass ampoules; in 1948 Nippon Yukikakou was renamed Ono Pharmaceutical, and in the same year, the company says, it began commercial production of ephedrine, an asthma medicine, with Professor Shunsuke Murahashi of Osaka University. Japanese Wikipedia records that the partnership was absorbed in 1949 and the glass company wound up.

From 1950 to 1964 Ono pushed its over-the-counter range with broadcast advertising. It sponsored the Asahi Broadcasting talk show Meoto Zenzai and the comedy Sucharaka Shain, and the wrestler Rikidozan appeared for its tonic Rikihormo, the company says. Its shares were listed in Osaka in 1962 and Tokyo in 1963. From 1968 it turned from consumer medicines to prescription drugs, opening the Central Research Institute, now the Minase Research Institute; the company says it achieved a world-first total synthesis of prostaglandin. Japanese Wikipedia lists prescription products including Opalmon, Onon and Foipan, and records that Ono has left the consumer-medicine market.

Ono’s PD-1 antibody Opdivo (nivolumab) has a dated paper trail. According to joint releases of 2014, the antibody came from a research collaboration Ono began in May 2005 with the American company Medarex; Bristol-Myers Squibb gained North American rights when it bought Medarex in 2009, and in September 2011 Ono granted it rights everywhere except Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. Opdivo was approved in Japan on 4 July 2014 for unresectable melanoma, which the companies called the first approval of a PD-1 immune checkpoint inhibitor anywhere in the world, and Ono launched it that September. On 23 July 2014 the two companies signed a new agreement to develop and sell Opdivo and other immunotherapies jointly in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. English Wikipedia notes that the drug draws on research by Tasuku Honjo of Kyoto University, who received the Nobel Prize in 2018.

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.

“Dedicated to the Fight against Disease and Pain.”

Ono states its corporate philosophy as “Dedicated to the Fight against Disease and Pain.” Its head office is in Chuo-ku, Osaka, where Japanese Wikipedia says head-office functions moved in 2003. Its research runs from the Minase Research Institute at Shimamoto, in Osaka Prefecture, and the Tsukuba Research Institute in Ibaraki, opened in 2003. Its products are made, by its own account, at the Fujiyama Plant at Fujinomiya in Shizuoka, first completed in 1975, and the Yamaguchi Plant, completed in 2019.

Abroad, the company opened offices in London in 1982 and Seattle in 1990, which became Ono Pharma UK and Ono Pharma USA in 1998, followed by subsidiaries in South Korea in 2013 and Taiwan in 2014. In 2024 it acquired Deciphera Pharmaceuticals, an American biopharmaceutical company, which Japanese Wikipedia lists as wholly owned. English Wikipedia records a joint research agreement with Harvard University in 2024, and on 8 October 2026 Ono announced an exclusive licence from Biohaven to develop and sell its IgG degrader medicines, including BHV-1300, in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and ASEAN countries.

For a design guide, Ono Pharmaceutical shows how a three-century merchant story — a shop sign, a guild register, a crane on the roof — can sit beside a research-led drug maker. Compare Shionogi, another Doshomachi house that grew from a drug wholesaler, and Takeda, another Doshomachi drug house. For this guide we use an indigo, a gold and a pale white with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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