Postby davidross » Fri Apr 25, 2014 11:55 am
Hi Warren,
Do itashimashite--you are most welcome, although my efforts are sadly inconclusive. Indeed, with the same mark appearing on Occupied Japan products, you have sunk my best guess of Yamazaki, as the firm was only founded in 1952, the year the occupation ended.
There were many small start-up companies in the immediate postwar (quite famously, Sony, for instance). My impression is that most of them required little capital and were innovative in nature. One key to narrowing down the identity of "Y" company is its production process, a topic I admit to knowing very little about. My guess is that Y used fairly heavy equipment for mass production. It therefore may have existed before the war and resumed its prewar production after the war ended, probably using the same machinery and even the same molds for items such as the vase, which to me looks 1920s-30s in its design. Another possibility is that the molds were borrowed from a Western (that is, American) partner company that imported Y's products.
It might be worth looking into a few books devoted to Occupied Japan collectibles, although I think their primary focus is on porcelain.
As Y company made export products, they may have advertised in English-language Japan travel guides and other Japanese publications aimed at tourists. Trev has been mining late 19th century and early 20th century sources for many years and providing invaluable information in the Contributors' Notes.
I don't know where you are located, but if you are close to a major university library, especially U Hawai'i, I would expect them to have many such Japanese primary sources from the decades of Y's production, say roughly the 1920s-1960s. I'm afraid it might be like looking for a needle in a haystack, but if you enjoy research, the time goes quickly and there is much to glean from these old sources.
Cheers
David R
