Osaka Court Rejects "Tsukimi" Trademark Claim Over FamilyMart Rice Balls
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The Osaka District Court has dismissed a trademark claim against convenience store chain FamilyMart over rice balls sold in a seasonal "tsukimi" campaign. The judgment, handed down on 15 October 2026 (case Reiwa 8 (wa) No. 3294), held that the chain's product labels were not similar to a registered mark for the word TSUKIMI.
"Tsukimi" means moon viewing, a custom tied to the autumn harvest moon. In Japanese cooking it also names dishes in which an egg yolk stands in for the moon. The plaintiff, Presto, is a company set up in 2013 whose stated business includes consulting. It owns Japanese trademark registration No. 6095738, a standard-character mark for 月見 (tsukimi) registered in November 2018 and covering lunch boxes and rice balls in Class 30. It sought JPY 1 million in damages, as a partial claim.
From about 30 September to 13 October 2025, FamilyMart ran a moon-viewing promotion in which several items carried "tsukimi" in their names, among them a rice ball filled with a soft-boiled egg and garlic mayonnaise. The word was printed in yellow on packaging, shelf cards and posters, and the pack noted that the egg was meant to evoke the moon.
The court, sitting as a three-judge panel of its 21st Civil Division, accepted that "tsukimi" was highlighted. It found, however, that the emphasis signalled the shared product concept for the season rather than the source of the goods. The court pointed to the Kojien dictionary entry for egg dishes called tsukimi and to many other foods using the word in the same way. On that basis it refused to isolate "tsukimi" from the rest of each label and compared the marks as a whole. Viewed that way, they differed in appearance, sound and meaning, so there was no infringement. Having reached that point, the court did not rule on FamilyMart's argument that the registration itself was invalid as descriptive.
The case shows a familiar limit on word marks drawn from everyday food language: registering the word does not stop others from using it in its ordinary sense on a product name.
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