We, Hosokawa Yoko,
are a professional group active in the manufacture of flexible packaging materials.
Our vision
Rolling out of a grand vision from the past to the future
Packages are ubiquitous items seen in a great diversity of places – supermarkets, convenience stores, or drugstores. Our packages are widely used in all scenes of everyday life, ranging from cakes, food products, and medical products to products of daily and industrial use.
Packaging materials are required to have the primary functions of protecting the content and maintaining the quality of it to the use-by date and also to have the function of meeting universal design requirements in terms of their user-friendliness and ease of opening in ordinary life scenes. Another important factor is to have rich color printing of packages which appeal attractive features of products and to provide product information at the point of sale. To this end, packages are composed of a variety and diversity of materials and are subject to various forms of processing and artful contrivances being applied to it.
Hosokawa Yoko is a professional group offering flexible packaging materials with a plastic film being the main material.
Since the foundation of our Company we have risen to the challenge of many problems by understanding needs and seeds of the time and customers and responding to them with an accumulation of small contrivances. These efforts have led to the development of original technologies and original products. We have taken pleasure in creating new customer markets and are proud of our history and results of having delivered to the world a great many original products. In recent development activities, efficient utilization of natural resources and environmental protection are expected as part of efforts to contribute to the sustainable society.
In addition to the technology and experience accumulated thus far, Hosokawa Yoko is intent on offering its products to its customers with a mindset determined to continue developing original technologies and products and with the spirit of continually rising to challenges.
The origin of our name
Through the epochs of civilization and in particular in the Meiji Era when trade with the world was flourishing companies managed by foreigners were called “Yoko.” In Chinese YO (yan) means “foreign country” and KO (han) “shop”, and this, namely foreigner’s shop, is the origin of the name YOKO. Later this naming was quite widely used by Japanese companies doing business with overseas trade partners. The meaning of YOKO also widened and thus YO came to mean the wide ocean and KO coming and going (both-way journey) and thus YOKO denoted overseas trade itself and became a well-liked expression used for trading companies setting foot on the world stage. Also the company name “Hosokawa Yoko” has embedded in it the idea of the Company’s founder, Takeo Hosokawa, who took his Company’s trading with China as a starting point for the rollout of business with sights set on the whole world and considered the whole world as its partner.
Hosokawa Yoko and Hosokawa Publishing Company
Takeo Hosokawa, the founder of Hosokawa Yoko, established, in 1946, a publishing company by the name Hosokawa Shoten (Hosokawa Publishing Company) which also reflects of Hosokawa Yoko’s challenging spirit. It published some 80 books of outstanding writers and artists such as Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Yasunari Kawabata, and Shiko Munakata. The books the Hosokawa Shoten published excelled in the fact that top-quality soft washi (Japanese paper), in their superior binding, and in their content and have won many admirations from specialists. The binding system known as “French binding,” in particular, attracted great acclaim. Until its closure in 1954 it won a great renown for its particular publishing policy as a publisher.
