What is the history of the Noritake Company?

Noritake Company started in 1904 and it was really a very forward thinking global company for the day actually. Two brothers, the Mura and Mura Brothers who were land barons in Japan who had done a lot of global travel. They had gone to Europe and they had gone to United States, really fell in love with a lot of western ways and kind of felt that there was possibility for using the technology and the craft of making dinnerware in Japan, but because all that dinnerware was made for Asian style pieces, they wanted to do it very European and very American style and designed a kind of a fine chinaware for the United States and they felt that they could do it at prices that would be significantly advantageous in the market place. So, they started the company in 1904. They had an office in New York. They produced it continuously. There was a kind of a saying that if you could not afford European or American china, that Noritake was a tremendously adequate substitute. So, through the 20th century, except of course during World War II, Noritake got developed as a really fine brand name and we had a really strong relationship... the US had a strong relationship with Noritake. After World War II during the martial plan, it was very important for jobs to be created so one of the industries that was selected as being a very favorable industry was the ceramics industry and it was because they employed a lot of women, which was very important in post war Japan. They produced a lot, actually the Japanese government had subsidized a lot of the dinnerware and it was sold to the US military during the Korea and Vietnam War at virtually no cost or very, very nominal cost. A lot of the GIs had brought it back with them from those assignments and it got the Noritake brand name even further to penetrate into the US market. Then in the 1960s, 70s, 80s and 90s a lot of department stores in United States who had very well developed china departments were starting to add Japanese china to give themselves more of a starting price point and Noritake got very, very, very popular with a number of stores throughout the country that had a real strong line for bridal registry. So that's sort of a brief history of what we are today... Noritake is a very large international company. We have a number of different divisions outside of the dinnerware division. We make components for vacuum florescent displays, which are used in electronics displays. One of our big customers being Bose. We make a line of real high-tech grinding wheels, which are used in the automobile industry. We do high-tech porcelain. So, it's a real global company headquartered in Nagoya, Japan, which is in the central part of Japan. There are two major offices, the design and financial are done in Fair Lawn, New Jersey and then operations, distribution, the retail division are headquartered in Cincinnati.