Here at O‘Hara, we believe in changing to fit the needs of our customers.
For over 40 years O’Hara has been developing, manufacturing, and selling equipment for behavioral experiments and behavioral analysis in Japan. Recently, O’Hara has begun to expand the market outside Japan. With the recent rise in technology aimed at monitoring and manipulating brain function in the living animal, neural activity monitoring in freely moving animals has become increasingly popular. However, this method makes it challenging to link brain activity to specific behaviors since the animal can move unrestrained. O’Hara saw the demand for a system that enables precise monitoring of neural activity during isolated operant behaviors. To meet this demand, O’Hara has developed several products, including a self head-restraining system, with the goal of saving the experimenter precious time as well as providing more control over the animals’ specific movement sequences.
O’Hara was created around the same time the Central Institute for Experimental Animals (CIEA) began importing large quantities of mice from the US to Japan. The CIEA was in need of a labor-saving way to maintain breeding colonies of a growing number of experimental animals. In order to solve this problem, O’Hara created their first product: a watering system to automatically supply water to the constantly growing number of experimental animals. This watering system proved to be extremely reliable and durable over time and is still widely used in many animal facilities across Japan.
Following O’Hara’s success with the watering system, O’Hara began working directly with pharmaceutical companies and academic labs to develop custom behavioral testing solutions. These systems include simple and complex mazes, passive and active avoidance tests, fear conditioning chambers, and multiple test batteries that O’Hara still manufactures today.
O’Hara guarantees that the evolving needs of scientific researchers come first. Following this approach is how we have maintained a stable and returning customer base for over 40 years!