In 1876 Baron Ichizaemon Morimura 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.
By 1904 Ichizaemon Morimura built his own factory in a little village named Noritake just outside of Nagoya. Six years later, in 1910, the first china products from the new company, called Nippon Toki Kaisha, left Japan for the U.S. On old marks the "M" inside the wreath stand for Morimura.
In 1941 the export offices were closed and the M was changed to an "N" as in Noritake. In 1981 the company officially changed its name to Noritake Company. The number of known different Noritake marks are more then 400.
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