Company history

Tsuruha began in 1929, when Tsuruha Masaru opened a small pharmacy, the Tsuruha Yakushido, in Asahikawa in central Hokkaido — a town druggist supplying medicine to local residents. He renamed it Tsuruha Pharmacy in 1956 and, in 1963, turned the sole proprietorship into a company, the corporate starting point of today’s Tsuruha Holdings. It stayed a small, closely held family firm, its shares in the hands of the Tsuruha family. What shaped everything that followed was geography: Hokkaido’s population is thin and its trade areas narrow, so a single store could never build depth in either procurement or people. The idea of bundling several stores to pool buying and standardize operations took root early.

The second-generation head, Tsuruha Hajime — a Kyoto University graduate who joined the family shop — grew skeptical of the traditional “consultation pharmacy,” where clerks talked customers into pricier goods. He wanted over-the-counter remedies like vitamins set out for shoppers to pick freely, as they would groceries, with advice given only when asked; that cut labour cost and let him sell cheaply, to the customer’s benefit. Drawn to the drugstore model preached by Yamaguchi Hideo — a store built around medicine but stocked with related sundries — he opened his first such store in 1967, over the objections of rivals and a legal presumption that drugs belonged behind the counter, arguing successfully that prescription-free remedies fell outside it.

Chain-building then took organizational form. In 1975 the family set up a separate head-office company, the Kusuri no Tsuruha Control Center, to hold the functions that bound multiple stores together. The count reached 50 stores in 1985; Tsuruha installed an online ordering system in 1987 and chain-wide POS registers in 1989, passing 100 stores. This standardized, item-level grip on inventory and sales was what let a chain work at all in thin, spread-out Hokkaido — and, just as importantly, it was a system that could later be laid over stores acquired elsewhere. Into the early 1990s the network was still entirely within Hokkaido, roughly a hundred stores anchored on Sapporo and Asahikawa.

In January 1995 Tsuruha struck a business-and-capital alliance with Jasco — the company that would become Aeon — beginning a relationship that would run for thirty years and, in the end, decide its fate. Under Tsuruha Tatsuru, who took the presidency from his elder brother Hajime in 1997, the chain both expanded and specialized: it strengthened dispensing pharmacy as Japan separated prescribing from dispensing, and by 1998 held roughly 62% of the Hokkaido market. That June it registered its shares over the counter, entering the capital market as an operating company.

The decisive move was outward. In 2000 Tsuruha acquired Drug Tomato of Morioka, its first store network outside Hokkaido and the opening of the federated M&A strategy that would define the next two decades; it set itself a goal of a thousand stores nationwide by 2010.

It listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s Second Section in February 2001 and moved up to the First Section in 2002, gaining the fundraising base for full-scale acquisitions — Rivas in Kawasaki in 2001 for a foothold in greater Tokyo, Potato Company in Yamagata in 2002. In 2005 it completed the structure that would carry all of this: the parent renamed itself Tsuruha Holdings and relisted on the exchange as a pure holding company — the vehicle built to receive one acquisition after another, formalizing the head-office/operating split first sketched in a 1991 reorganization.

With the holding company in place, acquisitions came in a steady stream — the group passed 500 stores in 2006. The method was consistent, and it had a name: the federated model. Tsuruha bought a regional leader whole, slid its own head-office machinery — POS, logistics, standardized procurement — underneath, and left the local brand and management largely intact. Kusuri no Fukutaro of Chiba (2007) brought greater Tokyo; Hearty Wants of Hiroshima (2013), Ledy Pharmacy of Ehime (2015) and Kyorindo of Hamamatsu (2017) added the west, Shikoku and Shizuoka, region by region.

It also crossed the border. A 2010 tie-up with Thailand’s Saha Group led to a joint venture and, in 2012, a first overseas store in Bangkok — symbolically the moment a Hokkaido chain went abroad, though the earnings contribution stayed thin, and later disclosures flagged impairment and slow store ramp-ups as an unresolved problem.

In 2012 the group reached 1,000 stores — twenty times the fifty of 1985, in twenty-seven years. Two years later it handed the presidency from the founding family’s Tsuruha Tatsuru to Horikawa Masashi, an outsider to the family: a rare act of governance self-renewal. The federated approach had built the map; what it had deferred was making the pieces earn as one.

The last gaps closed quickly: B&D of Aichi in 2018, an Okinawa store by franchise in 2019, and Drug Eleven in 2020 completed a network running from Hokkaido to Okinawa. Consolidated sales pushed higher through the period, lifted further by pandemic demand for a drugstore’s mix of medicine, food and daily goods.

In 2020 the leadership turned over again — Horikawa stepped down for health reasons and died the following year, and the founding family’s Tsuruha Jun, the third generation, took over. He renamed the very formula his family had perfected a policy of “letting go,” and pivoted away from it toward group synergy: private-brand penetration pushed toward 100%, consulting-style stores. Sales crossed into trillion-yen territory in the year to May 2024, yet a $27.1M (¥4bn) goodwill write-down on B&D and missed dispensing and private-brand targets showed scale outrunning profitability.

Then the thirty-year subplot resolved. In February 2024 Tsuruha signed a capital-and-business alliance with Aeon and Welcia; the industry’s number one (Welcia) and number two (Tsuruha) would integrate under Aeon — the largest deal in the sector’s history. A final three-way contract followed in April 2025 and was approved by shareholders that May. The combined group — more than 5,000 stores and over $13.4B (¥2tn) in sales — is the industry’s largest bloc; Tsuruha keeps its Sapporo headquarters while weighing a move of some functions to Tokyo, and the disclosed $334.1M (¥50bn) in synergies is the open question. A town pharmacy opened in Asahikawa in 1929 had become a consolidated subsidiary of Aeon.