What Do the Mitsubishi Diamonds Mean?

Mitsubishi is written 三菱 in Japanese. It combines mitsu, meaning three, with hishi, a water caltrop, the water plant whose diamond-shaped fruit gave Japanese its word for a rhombus. The name is often translated as three diamonds, and the Japanese name of the car company, Mitsubishi Jidōsha Kōgyō, means Three Diamonds Automotive Industry Company. The logo shows exactly that, so it needs little decoding.

The name came from Iwasaki Yatarō, who took over a shipping firm called Tsukumo Shokai in 1870. It was renamed Mitsubishi Shokai in 1873.

Wikipedia says the emblem was chosen because it recalled the crest of the Tosa clan, whose three oak leaves are arranged with threefold symmetry, and because it matched Iwasaki's own family crest of three stacked lozenges. The archive keeps both early forms from 1870, a black stack of three rhombuses and a ring of three leaves. By 1873 the two ideas had merged into a three-bladed red design. Our sources credit no individual designer, and later redraws are not attributed either.

The mark is shared with many other Mitsubishi group companies, from shipping and banking to the car maker. The diamonds already appear on the radiator of the 1917 Model A. That car was built by Mitsubishi Shipbuilding, and is described as Japan's first series-production automobile.

This is where the record is thin. Mitsubishi Motors has not published an explanation for the color in the sources we checked. The 1873 mark is already red, and the red has been used by the group since, but any claim about courage, passion or Japan's flag is interpretation. We state it that way because nothing in the documented history supports a specific meaning.

The three diamonds did not always look like this. In 1873 they were three pointed blades around a small ring. By 1914 the ring was gone and the blades met at one point, still narrow, and in 1964 they were redrawn as flat, wide diamonds meeting at a point, the shape most people know. When Mitsubishi Motors Corporation was formed on 22 April 1970 as a subsidiary of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, it simply took the group mark. The 1985 version stacks the red diamonds over MITSUBISHI MOTORS in bold black capitals, and on rally cars like the Lancer Evolution the diamonds appear on the doors, the nose and the bonnet.