Arinobu Fukuhara and the Pharmacy That Became Shiseido

In 1872 Arinobu Fukuhara opened a pharmacy in the Ginza district of Tokyo, which the company that grew out of it describes as Japan's first private Western-style pharmacy. He had studied Western pharmacology, and he named the shop Shiseido, after a passage in the Book of Changes praising the virtue of the earth from which all things are born.^[1]

Shiseido became one of the great global beauty companies.^[2] It began as a dispensary, and the order matters.

The pharmacy opened into a country whose court was giving up its own cosmetic order. In 1870 the government had told members of the new peerage who had come of age to stop blackening their teeth and shaving their eyebrows,^[3] and in 1873 the imperial household announced that the Empress and the Empress Dowager had given them up as well.^[4]

The face that had marked status for centuries was being retired by decree and by example in the same years that a new kind of cosmetic, sold on the authority of Western science, arrived to take its place. A pharmacist in Ginza was well placed for that change.

The company presents its founder as a pharmacist applying Western science to a business model previously unseen in Japan.^[5] Whatever the exact claims of priority, the positioning is clear. A preparation sold from a pharmacy carried a claim about safety and science that one sold from a stall did not.

That claim had a particular value in Meiji Japan, because the most widely used cosmetic was the problem. White face powder was made with lead, as it had been since the material first arrived from China.^[6]

In 1900 the Home Ministry prohibited lead and other harmful colouring materials in cosmetics, and then held white powder back from the prohibition, expressly for the time being, because no lead-free substitute yet existed.^[7] The substitute, when it came, was not Shiseido's. It was Misono oshiroi, launched in 1904,^[8] and certified harmless by three pharmacologists.^[9]

That is the market a pharmacist's cosmetics entered. Safety had become something a manufacturer could claim and a scientist could vouch for, and a company that had begun as a dispensary was well placed to trade on it.

Shiseido's red skin lotion, Eudermine, was being advertised by 1901; Japan's national library reproduces the copy in its history of Japanese make-up.^[10] In 1916 the company spun its cosmetics department off as a separate business and opened a shop devoted to cosmetics alone.^[11]

The sequence, a pharmacy first, a lotion sold on the pharmacy's authority, then a cosmetics business standing on its own, explains why the company's early products were sold as much on science as on beauty. The medicine was the credential.

Much of the founder's own career. The most accessible account of the early company is the company's own, which is a primary source about what Shiseido wants remembered rather than an independent history, and should be read with that in mind.^[12]