T. Hasegawa: Capturing and Recreating the Scent of Living Flowers

Our garden is not just a place to enjoy fragrance.
Naoki Tomita, T. Hasegawa Research Center (2026; translated from Japanese)

At T. Hasegawa’s Research Center in Kawasaki, a garden contains plants that release their scents through the seasons: daphne, cherry blossoms, roses, gardenias, and osmanthus. It is also a place where researchers observe how scent changes as flowers open and with the time of day, finding clues for composition.

T. Hasegawa is a comprehensive flavor and fragrance manufacturer, making flavors for food and fragrances for perfumes, cosmetics, and household products. It began as a shop selling aromatic materials in Nihonbashi in 1903. Ingredient knowledge developed through trade expanded into manufacturing and research. Today, people studying plant aromas, synthesizing compounds, and composing blends work together to create new scents.

Key Facts
From a Nihonbashi Merchant to Research and Manufacturing
Technologies Connecting Plant Aroma Research and Composition
Extraction, Analysis, and Composition in Food Flavors
Perfumers Complete the Scent within the Product
An Aside: A Wish Carried On through a Scholarship Foundation
Milestones
References

Key Facts

Official name: T. HASEGAWA CO., LTD.
Founded: May 1903, as T. Hasegawa Shoten
Founder: Totaro Hasegawa
Present company established: December 1961, by Shozo Hasegawa
Head office: Nihonbashi Honcho, Chuo-ku, Tokyo
Principal activities: Research, development, manufacture, and sale of food flavors, fragrances, natural extracts, processed fruit products, cosmetic ingredients, and related materials
Official website: T. Hasegawa

From a Nihonbashi Merchant to Research and Manufacturing

Totaro Hasegawa’s Apprenticeship and the Founding in 1903

Totaro Hasegawa was born in 1877. His father, Toshichi, traded in kimono fabrics, but Totaro’s interests lay in cosmetics and aromatic materials. Whenever he visited Nihonbashi, he would stop outside Matsuzawa Shoten, a merchant in aromatic materials, and came to want to work there. He entered its service at fourteen and set up independently after twelve years of apprenticeship. In May 1903, he opened T. Hasegawa Shoten in Nihonbashi Hongokucho.

Totaro began as a merchant of aromatic ingredients. Demand grew as soap, cosmetics, and foods flavored with vanilla became more widespread. Selecting materials and delivering them to users laid the foundation for the manufacturer that would follow.

In 1923, the business began manufacturing essences: products for flavoring foods and drinks. Strawberry, melon, lemon, and other flavors were also used for shaved ice. The shop’s role expanded from buying and selling ingredients to creating and supplying flavors for particular applications.

Postwar Reconstruction by His Son Shozo and Ryoshiro Hayashi

Totaro’s son Shozo Hasegawa inherited the family business. Shozo was not initially passionate about aromatic materials. After trying other work, he began studying them. In the blending room at night, he opened the sample bottles his father had collected and smelled them one by one, gradually becoming fascinated by composition itself. Inheriting the business also meant learning its ingredients anew through his own nose.

In 1945, the shop was destroyed in an air raid. That autumn, Shozo met his old friend Ryoshiro Hayashi at their alma mater in Mita and invited him to help rebuild the business. Trading resumed near Gofukubashi in November. They began with four people: Shozo, Hayashi, a temporary employee, and an accountant.

Synthetic aroma ingredient production began in 1947. The following year, T. Hasegawa Shoten was incorporated and the Kawasaki factory opened, while sales of food flavors developed. Postwar reconstruction meant not only reopening the shop but also establishing the ability to manufacture its own ingredients.

In December 1961, Shozo established T. Hasegawa Co., Ltd., which took over the business of T. Hasegawa Shoten. The founding in 1903, the shop’s incorporation in 1948, and the establishment of the present company in 1961 are distinct milestones. The new company’s Japanese name, explicitly identifying it with flavors and fragrances, also clarified its evolution from merchant to manufacturer.

Growth Supported by Researchers and Production Facilities

Expanding manufacturing required more than skill in blending ingredients. It also required technologies for making, separating, and purifying the necessary compounds. In 1958, the company borrowed laboratory space from Professor Tsutomu Kuwata at the University of Tokyo and, with the cooperation of Shigeru Koshimizu, investigated new substances, reactions, and separation methods. Improvements to reaction and purification equipment led to trial operation of new equipment in 1959.

The Fukaya factory opened in 1964, receiving the food-flavor manufacturing division, followed by synthetic aroma ingredient manufacturing in 1969. The Kawasaki Research Laboratory, also established that year, became a research base leading to the later Research Center. Fragrance manufacturing also moved to Fukaya in 1977, consolidating production. The Itakura factory opened in 1984.

The Research Center was completed in Kawasaki in 2009, bringing research divisions together. Today, three institutes cooperate: the Technical Research Institute, Flavor Research Institute, and Fragrance Research Institute. Specialists developing methods of analysis, synthesis, and evaluation share their findings with those creating food flavors and fragrances. The founder’s ingredient business has evolved into collaboration between researchers and scent creators.

International Expansion and Today’s Business

The company established a US subsidiary in 1978. In China, a Shanghai trading company followed in 1996 and T. Hasegawa (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. in 2000; the latter became fully operational in 2001. The Suzhou company, established in 2006, likewise did not reach full operation until 2009.

Current overseas operations focus on North America, China, and Southeast Asia, creating flavors and fragrances with local preferences in mind. In the United States, ABELEI became a subsidiary in 2024, expanding the company’s food-flavor offering. In November 2025, T. Hasegawa acquired all shares in Hoàng Anh, a Vietnamese producer and seller of food flavors and ingredients. These developments expand its food-related business.

In October 2024, Kenji Hasegawa became President and COO, sharing leadership responsibilities with Chairman and CEO Takao Umino. Alongside compounded flavors and fragrances, the business now includes natural extracts from coffee, tea, and vanilla, processed fruit products, and cosmetic ingredients. Its technologies not only add aroma but can also remove unwanted odors from natural colorants used in foods.

Technologies Connecting Plant Aroma Research and Composition

Studying Living Flowers with Aquaspace

Distilled essential oil and the scent drifting around a flower are not necessarily the same. Inspired by the way moisture carries scent in morning mist, T. Hasegawa developed its proprietary Aquaspace aroma collection method. Humidified air is introduced into the space around a plant, or headspace, to collect and analyze aromas released by flowers and fruit.

This is not the same process as production-scale distillation for obtaining large amounts of aromatic material. It is a technology for understanding the scent of living plants and obtaining fundamental data for composition. Combining those data with perfumers’ sensibilities produces aroma CAPTURE, a fragrance series that brings the impression of blooming flowers to perfumes, hair care, fabric softeners, and other products.

At the Research Center’s garden, rose plants were brought in and cultivated, and their flowers evaluated and analyzed to recreate nine rose scents. Even scents that change when flowers are cut can be studied across flowering stages and times of day when the plants grow on-site. The garden brings researchers closer to the moment a flower blooms.

Kuromoji Research That Began with a Pick for Japanese Sweets

Ryoko Miyajima’s research into kuromoji began with a small experience while eating Japanese sweets. Each time she raised a sweet using the wooden pick provided, she noticed a refreshing aroma. Wanting to understand its source, she began comparing the pick, essential oil, and branches collected from the institute’s garden.

I want to bring the appeal of authentic natural scents to everyone.
Ryoko Miyajima, Fragrance Research Institute, T. Hasegawa Research Center (2024; translated from Japanese)

She scraped the inner bark of the pick to examine its scent and collected aromas drifting from the cut surfaces of new branches. Even within the same plant, processed wood and newly grown branches have different balances of compounds. Combining analysis with human assessment of each compound’s contribution, she reconstructed the pick’s woody-floral scent and the new branches’ fresh woody-green scent. The recreated new-branch fragrance joined the aroma CAPTURE range.

Miyajima moved through technical research, research planning, and marketing before working in basic fragrance composition. Turning a scent encountered in an everyday object into a usable material through research and blending illustrates how understanding and creating aromas are inseparable.

Analysis and Synthesis Reveal Trace Compounds in Rose

In 2016, Teruhisa Ohashi and colleagues presented research on important aroma compounds in Damask rose at an academic conference. By examining aromas released from its petals, they investigated the roles of rotundone and a compound they named DAMASCENOLIDE. Reproducing only the compounds present in large proportions does not necessarily reproduce a living flower’s scent. Trace compounds can change the overall impression.

To identify DAMASCENOLIDE, the researchers isolated 2.8 milligrams of the compound from 330 grams of rose absolute. They examined its structure and confirmed it through comparison with a synthesized sample. In comparative testing, an aroma reconstitution containing both compounds was judged to have enhanced floral richness, sweetness, and naturalness. This shows a concrete process by which analysis and synthesis broaden the options available in composition.

Extraction, Analysis, and Composition in Food Flavors

Similar investigations of trace compounds also inform food flavors. For its development of HASEAROMA, combining extraction and analysis of food aromas with synthesis and composition, T. Hasegawa received the Japan Society for Bioscience, Biotechnology, and Agrochemistry’s 2015 Award for Achievement in Technological Research. The research aims to restore the characteristic flavors of materials that are easily lost during food processing.

For example, researchers searched yuzu peel oil for a compound that contributed strongly to its character even in minute amounts, naming it YUZUNONE. They confirmed its structure by comparison with the natural substance, established a synthesis method, and applied it to compounded flavors. A flavor manufacturer’s work extends beyond understanding aroma to supplying ingredients in usable quantities.

For food ingredients, the company uses steam distillation, solvent extraction, separation, and purification, as well as enzyme treatment, fermentation, and heat-induced reactions. Obtaining tea or coffee extracts requires different technologies from recreating aromas generated during cooking. Flavorists build compositions with not only the ingredients’ own aromas in mind but also the flavor they produce when added to foods and beverages.

Perfumers Complete the Scent within the Product

An aroma’s component list provides important creative clues, but simply mixing those components does not necessarily produce the desired result. Analysts and perfumers rework a scent while checking for compounds not yet captured and whether the proportions are appropriate. A fragrance in a sample bottle also diffuses differently after being added to shampoo or fabric softener, making evaluation in the final product essential.

Even a manufacturer’s request for a “flower scent” does not point to a single formula. Roses, too, differ by variety and season. Evaluators and marketers make the intended image more concrete and connect it with the perfumer. Alongside the fragrance direction, they check compatibility with the base, stability, and the impression during use, refining the result repeatedly.

A.S., a perfumer at the Fragrance Research Institute, recounts visiting a grower for two days and one night to follow a flower’s scent through morning, noon, and evening. Using its aroma around 9 a.m. as a guide, the perfumer worked with an analyst on repeated fine adjustments toward the remembered scent of the living flower. Including analysis, the work reportedly took about six months. It conveys the practical reality of composition using both numerical data and the nose.

After joining the company, employees learn about materials and ways of describing scent, developing a shared understanding across roles. This education connects expressions such as “add brightness” with specific adjustments. It trains recruited employees rather than operating as a perfumery school open to general enrollment.

An Aside: A Wish Carried On through a Scholarship Foundation

Beyond the flavor and fragrance business, Shozo also left a wish to support the education and exchange of younger generations from Asia. He hoped to mark the company’s centenary by contributing personal assets to a foundation assisting international students, but died in 2001 before seeing it realized. His wife Tamiko and company executives carried on his wishes, establishing the Hasegawa International Scholarship Foundation on October 10, 2003. Its support for students is separate from the company’s internal employee education.

Milestones

May 1903: Totaro Hasegawa establishes T. Hasegawa Shoten in Nihonbashi.
1923: Essence manufacturing begins.
1945: The shop is destroyed in an air raid. Trading resumes in November.
1947: Manufacturing of synthetic aroma ingredients begins.
1948: T. Hasegawa Shoten is incorporated. The Kawasaki factory opens, and sales of food flavors expand.
1958–1959: New substances, reactions, separation methods, and equipment are investigated in a University of Tokyo laboratory. New equipment enters trial operation in 1959.
December 1961: T. Hasegawa Co., Ltd. is established, taking over the shop’s business and beginning research into spice flavors.
1964: The Fukaya factory opens, receiving the food-flavor manufacturing division.
1969: The Kawasaki Research Laboratory opens. Synthetic aroma ingredient manufacturing moves to Fukaya.
1977: Fragrance manufacturing also moves to Fukaya.
1978: A US subsidiary is established.
1984: The Itakura factory opens.
1994: The technical information journal HASEGAWA LETTER is launched. It becomes digital in 2022.
2000–2001: The Shanghai manufacturing company is established and becomes fully operational the following year.
2003: The company celebrates its centenary. The Hasegawa International Scholarship Foundation is established.
2006–2009: The Suzhou company is established and becomes fully operational in 2009. Also in 2009, the Kawasaki Research Center is completed, bringing research divisions together.
2015: Research related to the development of HASEAROMA food flavors receives the Japan Society for Bioscience, Biotechnology, and Agrochemistry’s Award for Achievement in Technological Research.
2016: Research on important trace aroma compounds in rose is presented at an academic conference.
2024: ABELEI becomes a US subsidiary. Kenji Hasegawa becomes President and COO in October.
November 2025: All shares in Vietnam’s Hoàng Anh are acquired.