Company: Takara

Takara Co., Ltd. was a Japanese toy company founded in 1955, that merged with another prominent Japanese toy company, Tomy Co., Ltd., on March 1, 2006.

The company motto was 「遊びは文化」 (Asobi wa Bunka) which means "playing is culture."

Takara is perhaps best known for producing the transforming Diaclone and Micro Change toylines which were collectively re-branded as Transformers for the western market by Hasbro in 1984. Takara is also the originator of the hit toylines Battle Beasts (BeastFormers in Japan), E-kara karaoke microphone, Battle B-Daman and Beyblade (toy), all of which were sold or distributed internationally by Hasbro. Takara continues to sell Microman - the basis for the popular toyline "Micronauts" - which was first sold internationally by the now-defunct Mego in the 1970s, and Choro-Q, a mini pullback car, production of which has been running since 1978 and which has often been marketed in Western countries as Penny Racers.

Takara was also a video game developer and publisher, well-known during the early 1990s for porting some of SNK's Neo-Geo-based arcade games - especially the Fatal Fury and Samurai Shodown series - to less powerful home consoles such as the Sega Genesis and the SNES, and also for the Game Boy.Takara also was involved in the 2003 production of the game seek and destroy with play it. It published its own 3-D fighting game series, Battle Arena Toshinden, which was developed by Tamsoft. Takara also published other Japan-only games based on semi-popular franchises in that country. The extent of Takara's actual involvement in videogame development is largely unknown, however, since many of the company's games were developed by smaller companies not credited on the packaging or title screen, such as Tamsoft, BHE, E-game and KID corp, and therefore are often mistakenly credited to Takara.

Takara purchased a controlling stake in publicly traded software publisher Atlus in 2003, and for several years the licenses of some Takara properties were licensed to and published under that name. After the merger with Tomy in 2006, the ownership stake in Atlus was sold to Index Holdings (the merged company's lead shareholder), and Takara-branded licenses such as Licca-chan, Jinsei Game (The Game of Life) and Choro-Q were brought back in-house to the merged company's consumer software division, alongside the on-going Zoids and Naruto series'.

Takara and Tomy announced their merger on May 13, 2005, to become effective March 1, 2006. In English, the legal name of the merged company is TOMY Co. Ltd. while in Japanese the legal company name is the combined name, K.K. Takara-Tomy (株式会社タカラトミー).

While Japanese commercial law allows wide latitude in translating Japanese corporate names into official English names, the merged company took the unusual step of adopting the one-sided TOMY Company, Ltd. name in official English, while taking the combined name K.K. Takara-Tomy (株式会社タカラトミー) in official Japanese. Additionally, international subsidiaries of Takara were merged into those of TOMY. Therefore, while the "Takara" brand is still in use for some products, officially, in English, Takara as a corporate entity no longer exists. Confusingly, the Japanese company's corporate logo is a simple amalgamation of the former Takara and Tomy English logos. The logo, along with the tendency for direct translations of Japanese information into English and an ardent international fan base for some famous toys originating at Takara, have caused much of the press and the general English-speaking public to call the merged company "Takara-Tomy", even in English.

Domestically, Takara-Tomy continues to use the former names as brand names on toy lines which originated in each company, although most new toy lines or stand-alone products carry the new Takara-Tomy brand and logo. Production of staple toy lines such as Transformers, Choro-Q and Licca-chan are continuing, and in many cases gaining synergy from the cross-marketing with Tomy's brands.