Walk into certain shopping districts in Shanghai or Beijing and you can find two completely separate stores, sometimes just a few hundred meters apart, both operating under the exact same name: 无印良品 (wú yìn liáng pǐn), MUJI. One is the Japanese company you already know, the one that sells notebooks and clothes in colors that don't have names, just numbers. The other is a Chinese textile company that has legally owned that exact name, in China, for towels, bedding, and blankets, for more than two decades. Neither store is lying to you. Both are telling the truth, at the same time, in the same language. And after more than fifty separate lawsuits, this fight still isn't over.
There's an irony sitting right in the name itself, and it's the kind of detail a forensic linguist notices before a lawyer does. 无印良品 (wú yìn liáng pǐn) translates literally to something like "no brand, quality goods," a name built around the idea of being unbranded, generic, humble on purpose. It's a clever bit of naming, the whole marketing pitch is that you shouldn't need a flashy name to trust the quality. Which makes it darkly funny that a company built around downplaying the importance of branding has now spent more than two decades, and fifty-plus lawsuits, fighting over exactly who gets to use that name. The concept of being brand-less turned out to be one of the most heavily litigated brands in modern Chinese trademark history.
Here's how it started, and it's a much smaller mistake than you'd expect for a dispute this large. Ryohin Keikaku, MUJI's parent company, began filing Chinese trademarks in 1999. But at the time, they didn't register the Chinese-character version of their own name, 无印良品, for Class 24 goods, the textiles category covering things like towels, bedsheets, and blankets. In April of 2000, a company called Hainan Nanhua Industrial Trading filed for exactly that: the same characters, the same textile class, before MUJI had claimed it. The application cleared preliminary examination in January 2001. MUJI formally opposed it. That opposition is the official starting gun of a legal battle that has now run for more than twenty years, over a category MUJI simply hadn't gotten around to yet.
In 2004, the disputed trademark was sold to a company called Beijing Cottonfield Textile Corp, and Cottonfield became MUJI's primary opponent from that point on. Over the following years, MUJI threw essentially every legal tool available at the registration: formal opposition, opposition review, a three-year non-use cancellation attempt, invalidation proceedings, and administrative litigation, all the way up through China's Supreme People's Court. And again and again, the reasoning from Chinese courts came back to the same core finding. In the year 2000, when Hainan Nanhua first filed, MUJI simply wasn't well known enough inside mainland China yet to qualify for the kind of cross-class trademark protection that might have blocked the filing. Under Chinese trademark law, an unregistered but sufficiently famous brand can sometimes claim protection outside the specific categories it filed in, but only if it can prove it was already famous enough, in China specifically, at the relevant moment in time. MUJI couldn't clear that bar. Being a household name today doesn't retroactively make you a household name in 2000. Trademark law, it turns out, does not do time travel.
For years, this looked like a fairly standard trademark squatting story: foreign brand arrives late, loses a category to a local filer, familiar shape, disappointing outcome, everybody moves on. But then it kept escalating, in ways that turned this into something closer to a real rivalry than a single legal dispute. In April of 2015, Beijing Cottonfield went on the offensive and sued Ryohin Keikaku and MUJI Shanghai directly, for trademark infringement. Their argument: MUJI was selling textile products, blankets, bedspreads, and bath towels, bearing the 无印良品 name, directly inside Cottonfield's own protected category. In November of 2019, Beijing's High People's Court ruled against MUJI, ordering the company to pay 626,000 yuan in damages and issue a formal public apology.
Then came the twist that turned this from a trademark fight into something almost personal. After that loss, MUJI posted written notices in its stores describing Cottonfield's registration as an instance of trademark squatting, or 商标抢注 (shāngbiāo qiǎngzhù) as it's known in Chinese IP circles, a term with real sting attached to it. Cottonfield sued again, this time for commercial defamation, arguing the language falsely implied their textile products were counterfeit or illegitimate. In late 2021, the Beijing Chaoyang District Court agreed, finding that MUJI's public statement amounted to spreading false information that damaged Cottonfield's business reputation. MUJI was ordered to pay another 400,000 yuan and post yet another public statement, this time retracting the earlier one. In effect, MUJI lost not just the original trademark case, but a second case simply for how loudly it complained about losing the first one.
Meanwhile, the underlying trademark registration kept getting relitigated on its own separate track. In 2009, Cottonfield filed a continuation application extending its protection further. Ryohin Keikaku fought that too, and in May of 2021, the Beijing High People's Court upheld Cottonfield's continuation registration once again. Some more recent reporting points to a further Supreme Court ruling in mid-2025 reaffirming Cottonfield's Class 24 rights, which, if accurate, would put this dispute at close to a quarter century of continuous litigation between the same two companies over the same four characters.
The real-world consequences of all this landed squarely on ordinary Chinese consumers, who never asked to be part of anyone's trademark strategy. Because both companies legally use the identical characters, 无印良品, for different but overlapping product categories, genuine confusion followed. One survey of Shanghai shoppers found that 42 percent mistakenly believed Beijing Cottonfield's textile products came from the real Japanese MUJI. Thousands of online complaints about "fake MUJI" products have piled up over the years, even though, legally speaking, Cottonfield's textile goods aren't counterfeit at all. They're simply a separate company using the same name inside its own, entirely legitimate registered category. Try explaining that distinction to someone who just bought a towel they didn't expect.
What makes this case so valuable for understanding China's trademark system isn't any single ruling, it's the accumulation. More than fifty separate lawsuits, spanning trademark administrative litigation, straightforward infringement, unfair competition, and commercial defamation, all stemming from one company's decision to file a name one year too late, and one company's inability to ever fully win it back. Ryohin Keikaku's own president was reported to have reflected candidly on the lesson learned: in China, filing your trademarks in the right order and the right categories isn't just paperwork, it's existential to how your brand actually gets to operate for decades afterward.
I bring this case up constantly with clients thinking about entering the Chinese market, because it's the cleanest argument I know for filing every relevant class of trademark protection immediately, in every category your product could conceivably ever touch, long before you think you'll need it. "We'll get to that later" is exactly the gap that let this entire saga begin in the first place. In fifteen-plus years of watching companies navigate China market entry, I have never once seen a company regret filing too many classes too early. I have seen plenty regret filing too few, and MUJI is still paying legal fees on that regret more than twenty years later, with apparently no end date in sight.