A porcelain teapot with a Noritake-style mark

It was a lovely porcelain teapot but not my type. It had likely been part of set with a creamer and sugar bowl years ago. But those other pieces had walked off with relatives or gotten broken way before the teapot found its way to the auction table.

The teapot was hand painted in the right colors: aqua and white with roses and gilt. It was a traditional porcelain pot, like the many other 20th-century pieces I’d seen at auction bearing the names of well-known makers.

This one was in impeccable condition: None of the gilt was broken (a few places on the handle showed some wear from use), the colors were vivid, and there were no chips anywhere on it. Someone had taken very good care of it.

How it had ended up on the auction table was a mystery. It probably had been tossed by a relative whose style was antithetical to it and couldn’t find a place for it. I happened to get it in a box lot of items at an auction recently.

When I was going through my stash at home, I saw the beauty in the teapot’s combination of colors and gilt trim. It was just plain awesome – much like a yellow and gilt pitcher that I had bought at auction two years ago and loved for its brilliant color.

I recognized the style of the teapot, and looked under the bottom for the name Limoges or Nippon. All I saw was a maker’s mark – or backstamp – that I had not seen before. It was a crude stamp that looked like a lizard or a salamander, or a spider with too few legs inside a circle. It looked too messy to be authentic, but I figured I’d check anyway.

I knew it wasn’t the French Limoges because its name was usually part of the marking, or the Japanese Nippon, whose pieces usually had an M in the center of a wreath. Earlier Nippons have a rising sun or a maple leaf along with the name.

So, I went sleuthing in Google to see who made it. It wasn’t an easy search: I went through page after page and list after list of porcelain and pottery marks and came up with nothing. Then I searched eBay for similar-looking teapots, and found that this one was closer to Nippon than Limoges.

So, I started looking for Nippon marks and kept getting the M. Then I remembered that Nippon was also associated with Noritake, and started looking for its marks.

I learned that porcelain shipped to the United States after 1891 had to be marked in English with the country of origin. The word Nippon (the Japanese name for Japan) was used for that country, regardless of the maker. Before 1891, no country of origin was used, and the items may not have been marked at all, according to the website gotheborg.com.

From 1921 up to World War II, porcelain was marked Japan rather than Nippon, and shortly thereafter, “Made in Japan.” After the war, some were marked “Made in Occupied Japan.” Most pieces marked Nippon, according to gotheborg.com, were likely made by Noritake, which used 400 different marks on its wares.

I went through the Noritake listings – not finding anything that resembled my mark – and finally came upon one that was close. It was a “Komaru” symbol meaning “overcoming difficulties.” Beneath it were the words “Made in Occupied Japan.” It was said to have been first used in the early 1900s, with variations up until the 1950s. I also found other items with the Komaru symbol and the words “Nippon Toki Kaisha.”

That made me wonder if my teapot was a knockoff or a fake, since it didn’t have any words alongside the crude symbol. The gotheborg website noted that the demand for marked Nippon pieces in the 1960s led to a rise in fakes. Stencil-based fake marks were applied to porcelain imported to the United States, even for pieces that were of similar quality as the real Nippons. The fake marks looked like a piece of scotch tape applied inside a glaze area, according to the website.

I couldn’t find a teapot similar to mine among the fake pieces on the International Nippon Collectors Club site, nor fakes of the Komaru symbol elsewhere. If you can identify the piece, please leave me a comment in the box below.