Japan’s Seto Inland Sea holds many islands, and Shodoshima, a larger one, boasts a variety of natural, agricultural, and cultural attractions. Its tourism website shows its efforts to attract visitors and gain a following.
Shodojima found itself so popular that it was another of the Japanese victims of attempts at registering confusing trademarks in China. Japan’s NHK news reported that some individual in Dalian, China had registered a trademark for processed food and other items with the characters “香川小豆島” (Kagawa Prefecture, Shodoshima), clearly referring to this location, in January 2019. Kagawa Prefecture and other parties claimed that this trademark could hurt their exports to China and filed an opposition in September 2019.
The China National Intellectual Property Administration’s trademark bureau then notified Kagawa and others on January 14, 2021 that it agreed with them in accordance with Chinese trademark law stating that popularly known foreign place names may not be registered as a trademark, and would proceed to scrap the registration.
It is surprising that this application slipped by examination in the first place, but the Kagawa and other plaintiffs expressed happiness that Shodoshima was popular enough to be targeted for trademark registration!
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Taro Yaguchi
Sources
“中国「香川小豆島」の商標を棄却 [China overrules trademark for ‘Kagawa Shodoshima’].”
https://www3.nhk.or.jp/lnews/takamatsu/20210118/8030009037.html January 18, 2021. Accessed January 21, 2021.
Header image: “Angel Road” on Shodo-jima, adapted from 663highland on Wikipedia.
