The JPO Appeal Board ruled that

a senior trademark registration for the mark “ANNIVERSARY” in standard character designating jewelry in class 14 is unlikely to cause confusion with a junior mark “ANNIVERSARY DIAMOND” written in plain letters other than a letter “O” which was replaced with a diamond-ring device (see below), even if the mark is used on diamond rings in class 14[Fufuku2015-19812].

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The Appeal Board cancelled a refusal decision rendered by the JPO examiner on the grounds that:
(1) From appearance and pronunciation, the “ANNIVERSARY DIAMOND” logo can be perceived as one mark in its entirety. Besides, both terms of “ANNIVERSARY” and “DIAMOND” are quite familiar with relevant public in Japan and thus concept of “ANNIVERSARY DIAMOND” can be easily conceived from the combination.
(2) Due to the configuration, it must be appropriate to consider that the logo just gives rise to its pronunciation and meaning as a whole.
(3) Therefore, the refusal decision based on the assumption that the term of “ANNIVERSARY” plays a dominant role in the logo made a factual mistake and should be cancelled consequently.

Seemingly, above conclusion is not coincident with the Trademark Examination Guidelines (TEG) criteria as below.

Chapter III, Part 10 of TEG provides that:
A composite trademark having characters representing an adjective (characters indicating the quality, raw materials, etc. of goods or characters indicating the quality of services, the location of its provision, quality, etc.) is judged as similar to a trademark without the adjective as a general rule.

In this respect, as long as the junior mark designates diamond rings in class 14 and the device depicted on the term “DIAMOND” further impresses the concept of diamond rings in mind of consumers, the portion of “DIAMOND” should be considered descriptive. Otherwise, any combined mark composed of registered mark and a generic term pertinent to the designated goods is deemed dissimilar to the registered mark.

I suppose the Board just aimed to declare narrower scope of right where trademark consists of a dictionary word commonly used to the public.