Renaming Nihon Yuki Kako as Ono Pharmaceutical and absorbing the family shop (1948)

Folding up a trading name

Ono Ichibei Shoten, with more than 230 years of history behind it, did not take the manufacturing company it had created two years earlier as a subsidiary — it was swallowed by it. Once senior managing director Ono Yuzo had concluded that the only road left for survival ran through manufacturing medicines, the company’s name and its capital had no choice but to move to the side that made them. The name Ono Ichibei, carried since 1717, was filed away inside the manufacturer in 1949.

That said, moving into manufacturing did not turn the company into an originator of drugs overnight. What sustained Ono Pharmaceutical through the 1950s were over-the-counter remedies made famous by Asahi Broadcasting programmes; its own research would not reach world standard until it built the Central Research Institute and completed the total synthesis of prostaglandins in 1968 — twenty years after the unification. It was not the decision to fold up the trading name that changed the company, but what it went on making after folding it.