2 Comments.

I thought it might be a stylized character from Japanese writing, perhaps one of the "k" variants, but these are not really close enough. Closest candidate is perhaps the character for "o" – or "u" – or possibly a rotated "to".

Taking the characters for "ku" "bo" and "ta", one could selectively eliminate elements so that the remnants put together could be interpreted as the logo, but this method is quite a stretch. Even more so is spelling out the name completely and selectively combining only a few brushstrokes.

Then again, perhaps it is so prosaic as to be symbolic representations of the core product lines: gear = tractor (engineering in general), pipes = pumps and piping,

– Bo Leuf 2008-02-17 09:55 UTC

Good hypothesis, Bo! — I will try to look at some of the katakana/hiragana and see if anything seems to match. All my image search efforts online have failed to find anything that looks like it, but of course image search is rather hit-or-miss and depends on captions or associated text ... ^z

– MarkZimmermann 2008-02-17 10:22 UTC

(correlates: Comments on Critical Eyes, Kubota Logo Mystery, OnConventions, ...)</div>