Takii Brand Guidelines: Kyoto Seeds Since 1835, Momotaro Tomato & Early F1 Brassicas

A seed shop that became a mail-order house.

Takii traces its start to Kyoto in 1835, the sixth year of the Tenpō era. Japanese Wikipedia and the company’s own history agree that the first Takii Jisaburō, trading under the name Ōmoriya Jiemon, began selecting good seed and passing it on to growers who asked for it, and the company counts that as the beginning of its seed trade. The business stayed in the family: a second Jisaburō took it over in 1880, and a third incorporated it in 1920 as Takii Jisaburō Shōten. In 1926 it took the name it still uses in Japanese, Takii Shubyō, known abroad as Takii & Co.

Its signature early move was the catalogue. In 1905 Takii published its first seed list and began selling by post, which both Japanese Wikipedia and the company describe as the first seed mail-order business in Japan. The trade journal Greenhouse Grower, profiling the company in 2010, quoted Osamu Sugimura, then its director of international sales and marketing, as saying Takii served only the home market for its first 85 years, began selling seed outside Japan in 1920 and published its first English catalogue in 1927.

The research side began in the 1930s. The company dates its Nagaoka experimental farm, in what is now Nagaokakyō, south-west of Kyoto, to 1935, and later moved its main research farm to Kōnan in Shiga in 1968. It now lists breeding farms in Hokkaido, Ibaraki, Nagano, Shiga and Kumamoto among its Japanese sites.

War years, F1 hybrids and the Momotaro tomato.

Takii was a Japanese company through the Second World War, and the record of those years is thin but not blank. The company’s timeline records a Tokyo office opened in 1941. Japanese Wikipedia’s biography of the plant geneticist U Nagaharu (Woo Jang-choon), known for the “Triangle of U” theory of the cabbage family, says that in 1937 Takii Jisaburō brought him in to run the new Nagaoka research farm, where he worked on breeding brassicas, flowers and vegetables and on self-incompatibility and hybrid vigour, and that he left the company after the war ended in 1945. In the 2010 Greenhouse Grower profile, Sugimura said exports were limited during the war but vegetable breeding continued.

That breeding work shaped what came next. The company says its Nagaoka hybrid tomatoes Fukuju No. 1 and No. 2, released in 1948, made it an early private seller of F1 hybrid seed, and that in 1950 it released F1 cabbage and Chinese cabbage hybrids bred using self-incompatibility, which it calls the world’s first of their kind; Sugimura told Greenhouse Grower that the 1950 brassica hybrids were when sales outside Japan began to grow. The company lists Japanese agriculture-ministry prizes for its varieties at the national vegetable trials from 1953 onward, and says a 1975 pansy, Imperial Blue, won an All-America Selections award, which Greenhouse Grower also reported.

A widely sold product came in 1985, the company’s 150th year: the Momotaro tomato, bred to be picked ripe rather than green. Takii says 32 varieties have since carried the Momotaro name, with 23 sold nationwide. Flowers matter too: the company says its Big Smile sunflower won the grand prix at the 1990 International Garden and Greenery Exposition in Osaka, and in 1991 it launched the Sunrich series, which it describes as cut-flower sunflowers that shed no pollen, starting with Sunrich Lemon.

Seeds, breeding and documentation.

Vegetable seed companies sell something their customers rarely see in finished form. A breeder’s product is a variety: a tomato, a pepper, a carrot or a cabbage with traits that took years of crossing and selection to fix. The seed itself is small, dry and uniform, so most of these companies present themselves through what the seed becomes, and through the places where it is tested.

That is why the same images recur across the category. Trial fields in rows, greenhouses filled with trained tomato and cucumber plants, and close views of leaves and roots show the work of selection. Catalogues and websites favour cut tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers photographed on white, so that colour, shape and the inside of the fruit can be compared. Named varieties carry much of the message.

The audience is professional. Breeders such as these sell to commercial growers, propagators, processors and retailers rather than to home gardeners, and their packs and brochures carry practical information on sowing, growing conditions and the traits each company claims for its varieties. Several firms also show the stages that follow breeding: seed production by contract growers, then cleaning, sorting, germination testing and packing.

Open days are the most public face of the trade. In the north of North Holland, where companies including Enza Zaden and Bejo belong to the Seed Valley network, breeders invite customers to walk their trial fields and greenhouses each year; in September 2023 NH Nieuws reported that Bejo’s open days in Warmenhuizen drew visitors from about 70 countries. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company, and marks clearly what rests on its own word.

Still family-led, now worldwide.

Takii grew abroad from the 1980s. It set up American Takii in 1982, with a base at Salinas in California, then Takii Europe in the Netherlands in 1990 and companies in France, Brazil, Chile, Korea, India, Turkey, Hungary and Mexico, according to the company and Japanese Wikipedia. It has also bought breeders: the Dutch flower-seed company K. Sahin Zaden and the Danish Global Flowers in 2007, which Greenhouse Grower reported in 2010, and the vegetable-breeding arm of the Turkish firm Lito Tohumculuk in 2016, the company says. In 2005 it joined the Bio Seeds and Keygene research alliance in the Netherlands, and its germination laboratory gained International Seed Testing Association accreditation, the company says.

Ownership has stayed close to home. Greenhouse Grower described Takii in 2010 as privately held and family-owned, and the company still lists the founding year of 1835 alongside its incorporation in 1920. Takii Toshiya became president in 1970 and Takii Denichi in 1991; in 2023 Denichi became chairman and Kawase Takaharu president, the company says. Its head office remains in Kyoto’s Shimogyō ward, and it marked its 190th year in 2025 with an anniversary site. The company also runs a horticultural college at its research farm, which grew from a course opened at Nagaoka in 1947.

Takii presents itself mainly through its varieties rather than a corporate symbol. The company website groups brand sites around the Momotaro tomato, the Sunrich sunflower and the Phytorich vegetables it launched in 2010, and it sponsors Japanese radio and television programmes, Japanese Wikipedia says.

For a design guide, Takii shows how a family seed house can build a national name from single varieties. Compare Sakata Seed, its Yokohama counterpart, and East-West Seed. For this guide we use tomato red, leaf green and cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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