A cable maker, an American partner and a port city.

The Yokohama Rubber Co., Ltd. dates itself to 13 October 1917. On the company history page of its global website, Yokohama Rubber says it was established that day as a joint venture between Yokohama Electric Cable Manufacturing Company, the predecessor of today’s Furukawa Electric, and the American BFGoodrich Company. It names Suekichi Nakagawa, a director at Yokohama Electric Cable, as instrumental in setting up the company, and says he later became its second president. English Wikipedia gives the original Japanese name as Yokohama Rubber Manufacturing Co., Ltd.

The company says its original production site, the Hiranuma Plant in Hiranuma-cho, Yokohama, was completed in 1920, making belts, tyres and other products with refining processes and equipment from the United States. That plant, it says, was destroyed in the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, and a new Yokohama Plant was completed in Heian-cho, Tsurumi-ku, in 1929. Its history page quotes the founding spirit Nakagawa set out at the opening of that plant, beginning with the line “Production is a social service.”

The name on the tyres came later than the company. Yokohama Rubber says that in 1937 it changed its trademark name from Goodrich to Yokohama; English Wikipedia, citing the same company history, says its tyres had until then been sold in Japan under the Goodrich brand. In the post-war years the company moved its centre of production. It says it completed phase one of the Hiratsuka Plant in Kanagawa Prefecture in 1952, closing the Yokohama Plant, and that its Japanese company name was changed in 1963 to match the English, The Yokohama Rubber Co., Ltd.

From Goodrich licensee to a name of its own.

The American partner stepped back in 1981. Yokohama Rubber’s history records that in 1981 the B.F. Goodrich Company sold its majority share in the company to Japanese companies. By then Yokohama had already built a presence abroad: it says it set up Yokohama Tire Corporation as a tyre sales company in the United States in 1969, and consolidated its Australian sales companies into Yokohama Tyre Australia in 1981.

Its tyre names arrived over the same years. The company lists the G.T. SPECIAL range from the late 1960s, rally cars on G.T. SPECIAL tyres in the 1970s, and the launch of ADVAN HF for passenger cars in 1978; it marked the ADVAN brand’s 40th anniversary in 2018. In 1983, its history says, it began using the Performance Y mark, launched PRGR golf equipment and became the exclusive tyre supplier to the Macau Formula 3 Grand Prix that year. The GEOLANDAR range for recreational vehicles followed in 1996, with GEOLANDAR A/T.

The Performance Y is the centre of the modern identity. On its brand page, Yokohama Rubber explains that the red “Performance Y” at the start of the YOKOHAMA logo represents its stance of generating passion among employees to accept new challenges; that the lines extending to the upper right stand for a determination to keep growing into new areas; that the red stands for the energy and passion of its employees; and that the merging lines symbolise teamwork across its businesses. English Wikipedia says the mark was introduced for the Yokohama performance radials and PRGR ranges before becoming the corporate logo. Before it, the company says, it created the “Smileage Mark” in 1962 to promote YOKOHAMA brand tyres.

The company has grown well beyond passenger tyres. It says it acquired the Netherlands-based off-highway tyre maker Alliance Tire Group in 2016, celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2017, acquired Trelleborg’s Wheel Systems business in 2023, and completed the acquisition of Goodyear’s off-the-road tyre business in 2025. Its other lines, by its own account, include conveyor belts, hoses, marine fenders, sealants and Hamatite adhesives.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group are all tyre names. A tyre brand reaches people in an unusual way: its name is moulded into the rubber itself, so the lettering on a sidewall, the shape of a tread and the colours of a shop sign or a racing livery often do more of the identity work than any single advertisement. Many of these names have also travelled far from where they began, through mergers, new owners and factories in other countries.

That makes the plain questions behind each name worth asking: who started the business, which companies came together to form it, who owns it now, where its head office sits and where its tyres are made. A brand that began as a repair business, a rubber works or a family firm can end up as one name among several inside a much larger group, while still carrying the mark it was given decades earlier.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, its factories and the history of its marks — and attributes each claim to the source it comes from.

A head office beside the factory.

The company that began in the port city is no longer headquartered in Tokyo either. Yokohama Rubber’s history says that its head office was located in Tokyo by the late 1950s, at Shimbashi in Minato-ku, and that in 2023 it merged the head office with the Hiratsuka factory in Kanagawa Prefecture; English Wikipedia gives the company’s base as Hiratsuka. Its Japanese plants, according to the company, have included Mishima in Shizuoka Prefecture (1946), Mie (1943) and Shinshiro in Aichi Prefecture (1964). In the United States, English Wikipedia says the company makes tyres at West Point, Mississippi, and the company records setting up Yokohama Tire Manufacturing Mississippi in the 2010s.

Motorsport carries the brand most visibly. The company’s history mentions ADVAN racing tyres in Japanese endurance racing in the 1980s, a supply of ADVAN racing tyres as the control tyre for the WTCR, and ADVAN-equipped cars in Super GT. English Wikipedia says Yokohama has been the official tyre supplier of the Super Formula championship since 2016.

For a design guide, Yokohama shows a company that explains its own mark: the red Y, the rising lines and the merging strokes all come with a published meaning, and the founding link to Goodrich is part of the record rather than a footnote. Compare it with its 1917 partner, BFGoodrich, and with its Japanese neighbour, Toyo Tires. For this guide we use performance red, track black and steel grey with an italic condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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