Paramount Bed Brand Guidelines: The Tokyo Bed Maker Named for a Film Studio

A post-war workshop and a borrowed name.

Paramount Bed began in May 1947, when Ryusuke Kimura set up a bed-making business called Kimura Shindai Seisakusho — “Kimura bed works.” The company’s own English history spells it Kimura Shindai Seisakujo and gives the same year. In May 1950 it was incorporated as Kimura Shindai Kogyo, and, Japanese Wikipedia says, took “Paramount Bed” as its trademark — chosen for the word’s sense of “supreme,” and also under the influence of the Hollywood studio Paramount Pictures.

The business grew through factories rather than takeovers. Japanese Wikipedia dates an Edogawa factory in Tokyo to 1953; the company’s history adds a factory in Chiba prefecture in 1966 and one at Matsuo, also in Chiba, in 1970, which Japanese Wikipedia says took over the Edogawa plant’s work. In 1987 the company finally took its brand as its corporate name, becoming Paramount Bed Co., Ltd., and it listed on the over-the-counter market that December, moving to the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s second section in 1993 and its first section in 1996.

Its product history, as the company tells it, runs from a Gatch bed for hospitals in 1955 to the KA-45 of 1962, which it calls the first Japanese electric bed. In 1975 it made the KA-351, a bed that changes into a wheelchair, which it describes as the world’s first “dual bed”; the KQ-100 Aura home-care bed followed in 1983, and an electric ICU bed in 1987.

Rakusho, INTIME and a run of design awards.

The product that defines Paramount Bed in Japanese homes is the Rakusho home-care bed, launched in October 1993, Japanese Wikipedia says, and renewed as a new Rakusho in 2003, the Rakusho S series in 2009 and the Rakusho Z series in January 2014. For hospitals and care homes the company lists ranges including the KA-6000 hospital bed, the Metis PRO, the Espacia and the ALIUS series for intensive care; for households it started INTIME in 2003 as what it calls “a stylish new brand providing sound sleep,” and in 2019 a consumer brand, Active Sleep.

Design recognition is a large part of the company’s own story. Its awards page lists Good Design Awards from the Japan Institute of Design Promotion for, among others, the Rakusho Z series in 2014, the Metis PRO hospital bed in 2016, the INTIME 1000 bed in 2017, the Espacia hospital and nursing-home bed in 2018 and the ALIUS Series ICU electric bed in 2020. It also lists the same institute’s Design Excellent Company Award in 2006, selections for the Japan Industrial Designers’ Association’s JIDA Design Museum Selection for the Rakusho in 2008 and the Handiwalk in 2012, and a Nikkei Superior Products and Services Award for the second-generation Rakusho in 2004.

The company has also made the bed a platform for sensors and software. It dates its Smart Bed System, an integrated bedside-care system, to 2016, and lists a Good Design Award for it in 2017; it says its Nemuri SCAN monitoring system received a Monodzukuri Nippon Grand Award from the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry in 2019.

Production has spread beyond Japan. The company’s history names a factory and sales company in Indonesia from 1995, a factory in China from 2004 and a factory in Vietnam from 2013, alongside sales companies in Thailand, India, Mexico and Brazil and a regional headquarters for Asia Pacific in Singapore from 2012. Which products come from which plant is not set out on the history page.

Design and documentation.

Hospital bed and patient-handling companies present themselves mainly through brochures, websites and trade-fair stands. A common picture is a bright ward room: a bed raised to working height, the side rails up, a bedside cabinet in a pale wood decor and a window letting in daylight. Care-home ranges are shown differently, with warmer colours, wood-look panels and beds styled to look less like hospital equipment and more like bedroom furniture.

Patient-handling makers work with a different set of images. Ceiling lifts are photographed on rails running over a care bed, mobile hoists and slings beside a wheelchair, and transfer aids in narrow bathrooms. People are almost always present: a carer and a patient or resident, usually models in staged scenes, with the equipment placed at the centre of the frame and the room kept calm and uncluttered.

Trade fairs are the other stage. MEDICA in Düsseldorf and the Dubai health fair long known as Arab Health draw bed and lift makers from Europe, Asia and North America, and many of them build furnished room sets on their stands so that buyers can walk round a bed, try the controls and see a lift in use. Several companies also keep showrooms at their headquarters for the same purpose.

Many of these companies are family-owned or have passed through several owners, and some of the oldest began as makers of wire mattresses, iron beds or orthopaedic parts. The guides in this series set out what can be checked about each company, who founded it, who owns it and where it says its products are made, and mark clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A family business that went private again.

Paramount Bed has stayed with the Kimura family. Japanese Wikipedia says the family set up an asset-management company, Kimura Kosan, in 1982; it was the bed maker’s largest shareholder, and in 2011 it was renamed Paramount Bed Holdings, which took Paramount Bed Co., Ltd. under it by share exchange that October, along with two service companies. The holding company, headquartered in Koto ward, Tokyo, describes itself as the head of a medical group whose core company makes beds, mattresses and equipment for hospitals, care homes and households, with other companies inspecting and maintaining Paramount Bed products and leasing and wholesaling care equipment. Its president and chief executive is Tomohiko Kimura.

In September 2025 the group announced a management buyout. TMKR, a company set up for the purpose and wholly owned by an asset-management company of Tomohiko Kimura, made a tender offer for the shares from 25 September to 17 November 2025, the Nihon M&A Center’s news service reported on 24 September; the stated aim was to move from one-off sales of beds and mattresses towards rental, leasing and monitoring services and to focus on long-term growth without short-term pressure. On 18 November the same service reported that the offer had succeeded and that TMKR would become the parent company from 25 November. Japanese Wikipedia says the shares were removed from the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s Prime Market in February 2026, after a share consolidation left TMKR and Tomohiko Kimura as the only shareholders.

For a design guide, Paramount Bed shows how a name chosen partly after a film studio came to cover hospital, care and home products alike. Compare Hillrom, an American hospital-bed maker, and Stryker, which also makes hospital beds. For this guide we use navy, pale linen and mist blue with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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