Arinobu Fukuhara

Fukuhara was born in 1848 and trained as a pharmacist under the new Meiji government, rising to chief pharmacist of the Japanese navy while still in his early twenties. In 1872 he left to open Shiseido in Ginza, Tokyo — Japan's first Western-style dispensing pharmacy, separating the preparation of medicines from the doctor who prescribed them, as Europe did and Japan did not. The name came from a line in the I Ching about praising the virtues of the earth, which was a Chinese classical source for a shop selling Western science; the mixture was deliberate and it has been the company's whole strategy ever since.

The shop nearly failed. Japanese customers did not yet trust Western medicine, prescriptions were few, and the pharmacy limped for most of its first two decades. What kept it alive were products Fukuhara made himself and sold as premium goods: a toothpaste in 1888 that cost many times the tooth-powder of the day and became the first Japanese toothpaste, and in 1897 Eudermine, a skin lotion in a red glass bottle that was the pharmacy's first cosmetic and is still sold. He added a soda fountain in 1902 — an American idea, imported — and the Shiseido Parlour that grew from it is still in Ginza. He was also a builder of institutions beyond his shop, involved in the founding of a life insurer and in the development of Hakone as a resort.

The contested part is how much of Shiseido is his. The company that exists today — the camellia mark, the design department, the visual identity, the shift from pharmacy to beauty house — was made after 1915 by his son Shinzo, who had trained in pharmacy at Columbia and in photography in Paris and who ran the company as an aesthetic project. Arinobu built a pharmacy that sold a few premium products; Shinzo built the brand. The honest reading is that the father supplied the idea of sitting between two cultures, and the son supplied everything that made it worth looking at.