A factory, a renaming and a god of strength.

Tachikara is a Japanese ball brand, and the company traces it to 1915, when Iimuro Toyozaburo established the Iimuro Sports Equipment Factory in Tokyo. English Wikipedia gives the same year and spells the founder’s name Iimuro Toyosaburo. The company’s English-language history says that before the Second World War he built the business in the older commercial districts of Tokyo — Nihonbashi, Hongo and the area around Ueno’s Shinobazu pond, written as Uenoikenohata — and that as a maker of official balls he distributed beyond the capital, opening branches in western Japan, China and Korea.

The company took its present name in 1934. Its history says the name Tachikara comes from Amenotajikarao, a god in Japanese myth whom it describes as a symbol of strong muscles, bravery and righteousness, known as the male god with the strong hand of heaven; English Wikipedia also says the brand is named after this kami of strength, linking to its article on Ame-no-Tajikarao. The company calls the god the symbol of the company.

The company credits a second member of the family with its post-war reputation. It says that in 1950 Itaru Iimuro, Toyozaburo’s younger brother, developed a “seamless ball”, a leather ball without visible seams, and that he earned the respect of ball manufacturers around the world for it and for raising the standard of production in the factories he worked with. The company says those factories remain its partners and that Tachikara products are made in the same factories that produce official balls for sports federations.

The history then turns to Olympic and professional work. The company says Tachikara was certified as official ball maker for the 1964 Tokyo, 1968 Mexico City, 1976 Montreal and 1980 Moscow Olympic Games, that it acquired an official NBA licence in 1985, and that from 1987 to 1998 it worked as a manufacturer and distributor for Spalding. In 2013, it says, Tachikara Holdings Limited was established as a re-born company, and it celebrated its centenary in 2015.

Volleyball in North America.

In North America the Tachikara name is documented mainly through volleyball. Volleyball Canada’s own history of the indoor game records that its predecessor, the Canadian Volleyball Association (CVA), set up an equipment company called Sportquip that sold volleyballs including Tachikara, which it describes as then the official ball of the FIVB, the international volleyball federation. The CVA held exclusive distribution rights for Canada, the history says, before selling the company after other equipment businesses complained that the association was competing with them.

In the United States the brand’s college ties go back to 1980. A history of the American Volleyball Coaches Association (AVCA) polls published by Brigham Young University says the official coaches poll that began in 1980 on a bi-weekly basis and was known as the Tachikara Top Ten Division I Women’s Volleyball Poll, and that Tachikara co-sponsored the poll from 1980 through 1994.

The small-college associations have kept the brand on their courts. On 7 March 2008 the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) announced that Tachikara U.S.A., Inc. would continue as the “Official Volleyball Supplier of the NAIA” for women’s volleyball through December 2012, said Tachikara had been part of every NAIA women’s volleyball national championship since the sport was added in 1980, and named the SV-5W as the official volleyball. The agreement also made Tachikara title sponsor of the NAIA men’s volleyball national poll. On 18 December 2012 the NAIA announced an extension through December 2017 on the same terms, with the SV-5W again the official ball.

The two-year colleges followed a similar pattern. On 9 November 2017 the National Junior College Athletic Association (NJCAA) announced a three-year extension of its partnership with Tachikara USA, Inc., keeping Tachikara as the “Official Volleyball of the NJCAA” through the 2020 season. The association said Tachikara’s support dated back to 1985, that Tachikara would supply an NJCAA-branded leather volleyball for its championships, and that from the 2018 season Tachikara would be title sponsor of the weekly NJCAA volleyball rankings and player-of-the-week awards.

The parent company is today Tachikara Holdings, which English Wikipedia places in Taito ward, Tokyo, and whose name appears as the copyright holder on the brand’s Japanese website.

Design and documentation.

A ball or stick brand is read at very close range and in motion, so its identity has to work at small sizes and on curved or narrow surfaces. On a ball, the name is usually printed or stamped onto the cover, often with a model name and a number that lets players tell one ball from another; on felt, leather or synthetic panels the mark has to survive wear, mud and repeated impact.

Packaging carries much of the rest. Balls sold in sets often come in pressurised cans or in tubes and boxes, and the label on that container — its colour, the name and the lettering — is often what a buyer sees first in a shop, long before the ball itself is handled.

Stick and racket equipment adds another surface. Heads, shafts and handles carry logos, model names and sometimes moulded lettering, and those marks are shaped to fit narrow frames and plastic parts.

Each guide that follows sets out what can be checked about a brand — who founded it, who owns it now and how its marks have appeared — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A myth, a capitalised name and a custom panel.

The Tachikara identity starts with meaning. The company tells readers of its history that the word comes from Amenotajikarao, the god of strength with the strong hand of heaven, and calls that god the symbol of the company. The name is a promise of strength and of a hand, presented in the company’s own history as the reason for the 1934 change from the family name Iimuro to Tachikara.

On the page the brand is written in capitals. The company’s English website sets TACHIKARA in upper case throughout its history and vision statements, and the American associations that announced its sponsorships used the same name with a registered-trademark sign in their releases. The North American agreements also put a product code at the centre of the brand’s visibility: the SV-5W, named by the NAIA in 2008 and 2012 as its official volleyball, is a model designation that sits on the ball beside the brand name.

Sponsorship has carried the name into places other than the ball. The AVCA coaches poll ran under the Tachikara name from 1980 to 1994, the NAIA’s 2008 agreement made it title sponsor of the men’s volleyball national poll, and the NJCAA’s 2017 extension made it title sponsor of weekly rankings and awards.

In recent years the company has presented the ball surface itself as a design space. It says that after Tachikara Holdings was established in 2013 it started Tachikara Custom, a project for collaborations with brands, designers, leagues and events, and that in 2014 it developed a manufacturing method allowing freeform graphic designs on every panel of a natural leather ball, for which it said a process patent was pending. Its vision statement says it wants players to call Tachikara “my ball”.

For a design guide, Tachikara shows how a name with a mythological meaning, written in plain capitals, can travel from a Tokyo factory to Olympic courts and North American college gyms, and how a ball panel can become a canvas for collaboration. Compare it with Baden, the Washington ball maker, and Wilson, the American sporting-goods name. For this guide we use volley blue, court gold and leather white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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