In 1876, Ichizaemon Morimura VI and his brother Toyo founded Morimura Gumi with the intent of establishing overseas trading by a Japanese company. By 1878, Toyo had established a business in New York selling Japanese antiques and other goods, including pottery. The company was renamed Morimura Brothers in 1881. By the 1890s, the company had shifted from retail to wholesale operations and started working on design improvements for the pottery and porcelain ware, which had become one third of its business. By 1899, all of the pottery and porcelain decorating factories in Tokyo and Kyoto had been consolidated in Nagoya, and the company started research on creating European style hard white porcelain in Japan. In 1904, key members of this trading company created the
Nippon Toki Kaisha, Ltd. ("the Company that makes Japan's Finest China") in Japan. In 1939, Noritake started selling industrial grinding wheels based on its porcelain finishing technology. It now provides ceramic and diamond grinding and abrasive solutions for many industries. as well as heating furnaces and kilns, mixing technology, filtration systems, and cutting and grinding machines. Although consumers and collectors alike have called the tableware, "Noritake" (and/or simply, "Nippon") since the late 1920s, the Japanese parent company did not officially change its name to the Noritake Co., Limited until 1981. Evidently, since Noritake is the name of a place, the company was initially prohibited from registering the name as a
trade name. The
Noritake Garden in Nagoya features the production of its ceramics. ==Overseas==