Suruga-ya Brand Guidelines: A 1948 Shizuoka Bookshop, a 1998 Web Shop & Kyosho

A bookshop and a web shop.

Suruga-ya is a Shizuoka business with two roots. The older is a second-hand bookshop: Ōta Shoten opened in 1948 in Baba-chō, in Shizuoka city, Japanese Wikipedia says, and from 1995 sold game software and CDs alongside books, opening a branch in a shopping centre in Saku, in Nagano Prefecture. The bookshop was incorporated in January 1997, the date the present company gives as its founding; in 1998 it began wholesaling stock to manga cafés and other second-hand bookshops, and renamed its Saku shop A-too.

The younger root is the web shop. In April 1998 Tsunashige Sugiyama started the online store Suruga-ya.jp, and that September he set up a company, GX, which bought a game shop in Yaizu and opened another in Shizuoka city in December, Japanese Wikipedia says. The two businesses joined in stages. GX made Ōta Shoten a wholly owned subsidiary through a share exchange in March 2003; Ōta Shoten was renamed A-too in February 2005; and in September 2005 A-too absorbed GX, with A-too as the surviving company. In October 2005 A-too’s mail-order catalogue site and the Net Shop Suruga-ya site were merged into one.

The name in front of customers became Suruga-ya, written 駿河屋 in Japanese. It is shared with an unrelated business, Suruga-ya the confectioner of yōkan bean jelly, whose shop name Japanese Wikipedia dates to 1685. On 1 May 2025 A-too took the name Suruga-ya Inc. and moved its head office to the Suruga-ya Building in Aoi ward, Shizuoka city, according to Japanese Wikipedia, citing a company notice; Sugiyama is named there as its president.

From web shop to stores.

For its first years Suruga-ya was a website, and the shops had other names. A-too ran stores under its own name and, from August 2005, the Book Market chain, whose head-office business it took over from For-You. In January 2011 it bought part of the Famicom Shop Momotarō game-shop business from Runsystem, and it closed every Momotarō shop in September 2015, Japanese Wikipedia says.

The first shop under the Suruga-ya name, a figure and character-goods store, opened in December 2015 in Takatsuki, Osaka Prefecture. Stores in Akihabara and a Shizuoka flagship in Aoi ward followed in 2016, then Shinjuku, Ikebukuro and Sapporo in 2018 and Yokohama in 2019; a store at Ōmiya in Saitama, opened in April 2021, holds 400,000 items, according to Japanese Wikipedia. Some former A-too and Book Market shops were renamed Suruga-ya, and the company also runs “supported by Suruga-ya” stores with other retailers, such as a shop at Kōnosu-Fukiage run with the bookseller Tadaya from October 2021.

The stock is media and hobby goods, new and used. In March 2021 gamebiz described the company, then still called A-too, as a venture business in its twenty-fourth year whose flagship was the Suruga-ya.jp web shop. It dealt mainly in game software, CDs and DVDs, the paper said, with anime goods, plastic models, model cars, figures and trading cards as its main hobby lines, and it had 32 company-run stores and 81 franchised ones at the end of February 2021. Japanese Wikipedia gives 37 company-run and 91 franchised stores across its brands as of August 2024, and in December 2025 Impress Watch put the network at 152 stores in Japan and abroad.

The range has widened. The company began buying and selling new and used smartphones, tablets and headphones in November 2017, and opened Suruga-ya.com, a web shop for buyers outside Japan, in March 2019, Japanese Wikipedia says. It has also sponsored Shimizu S-Pulse, the Shizuoka football club, since the 2016 season.

Some of its stores came from other chains. In 2006 A-too took over Ecoa, a company in Sendai, and merged it in 2009; in August 2019 it took on some shops of Meikidō, a retailer that had gone bankrupt that June, renaming them Suruga-ya Otome-kan supported by Meikidō; and in March 2020 it began running three Enter King stores, previously operated by Sunset Corporation, Japanese Wikipedia says. Since June 2020 web orders can be collected in its stores. New stores in 2022 and 2023 took the chain into Yamaguchi, Saga and Kumamoto prefectures for the first time.

Design and documentation.

Japan’s second-hand, hobby, book and sports chains tend to present themselves through the store itself before any logo. Many of them grew from a single shop, and their corporate pages often open with that first branch, the town it stood in and the year it opened, followed by a timeline of new formats, franchise agreements and listings on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

In second-hand retail, the buying counter is as much a part of the identity as the sales floor. Chains publish what they buy, how customers can bring goods in or send them by post, and which stores take which categories, from books and CDs to trading cards, toys, clothing and electronics. Some run separate buying-only centres or online services alongside their shops, and describe these on the same corporate pages as their stores.

Hobby and collector chains lean on display and naming. Shops are often split into small rooms or annexes, each with its own name and a single subject, such as manga for one readership, vinyl figures or vintage toys, so that a sign at the door tells a visitor what lies inside. Book chains, by contrast, describe long aisles, broad stock and space to browse, and some have used bright lighting and open layouts to make used books look like new retail. Mascots and capitalised store names appear on signs, bags and advertising.

Behind the shop fronts sit corporate structures that the companies set out in plain terms: founders, holding companies, parent groups, franchisees and shareholders, along with overseas stores that opened, moved or closed. The guides in this group follow those published histories, and treat colours and typefaces as an unofficial interpretation rather than an official brand standard.

A reseller that bought a maker.

Suruga-ya has also bought a maker. On 25 March 2021, gamebiz reported, A-too acquired all the shares of Kyosho, the radio-control model maker founded in 1963, from an investment fund; the price was not disclosed. Japanese Wikipedia, citing the trade paper Nichiryū Web, adds that the Marui Group took a stake in the company and signed a capital and business alliance with it in December 2019.

The most recent alliance is with a marketplace. In December 2025 Suruga-ya and Mercari signed a capital and business alliance covering entertainment and hobby goods, Impress Watch reported. Under it, all Suruga-ya stock is linked to Mercari’s marketplace, the official web shops are named as Suruga-ya.jp and a Mercari Suruga-ya store, both selling Suruga-ya.jp items at the same prices, and a Suruga-ya shop sits on Mercari’s global app for buyers outside Japan.

Suruga-ya publishes no brand guidelines that are openly available; the palette here, a tea green with a mandarin orange, is our own interpretation and not taken from its signs or website.

For a design guide, Suruga-ya shows how a web shop’s name can become the name on a chain of physical stores. Compare Mandarake, the Tokyo dealer in used manga and collectables, and Book Off, the second-hand book and media chain. For this guide we use a tea green and a mandarin orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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