Short History of Noritake China Co. Kathy's Korner Antiques, Collectibles

A Short History of the Noritake China Co.

    The most popular "Nippon" pieces that collector's usually go for are mostly the delicately decorated pieces that were manufactured by the company that later would become the Noritake Company.
    Around the turn of the century the situation was different and there were yet no Noritake Company.
    The "Nippon" mark which actually just means "Japan" was used by a lot of different companies and put on just about anything that was to be exported.
    The first and probably largest company working with selling Japanese porcelain to the US was founded by Baron Ichizaemon Morimura in 1876 when he established a trading company called Morimura Brothers with offices in Tokyo, and a retail and wholesale office in New York for the export to America of china, gifts and other decorative products bought from factories around Nagoya, the center of Japan's ceramic production.
    I think we need to notice here that these items was not made by a single company but just bough and exported by the Morimura Brothers.
    Then finally in the 1904 Morimura built his own factory in a little village named Noritake just outside of Nagoya and six years later, in 1910, the first china products from the new company, called Nippon Toki Kaisha, left Japan for the U.S.
    In 1981 the company officially changed its name to Noritake Company.
    Finally to complicate matters totally I can also tell you that the number of known, different, Noritake marks are more than 400.