Another maybe not Japanese meoto yunomi set, signed in Klingon?

These meoto yunomi measure, larger cup 3.5" high x 3" wide, smaller cup 3" high x 2.5" wide. Very thin and made of white clay. The seller was in St. Paul, Minnesota where she found them at a sale. What really caught my eye is the very unusual stamped mark on the bottom. It does not look like writing to me, but the seller had a Chinese exchange student who thought it was Japanese and the seller was leaning that way, too, but was unsure. I made multiple images and manipulated them in several ways in an attempt to make the signature more clear. The image lower right of image #3 is not manipulated. Very inexpensive, a good research opportunity but a strain on my mental health.  After many attempts to try to figure out the signature, I even compared it to the Klingon alphabet! They definitely "feel" Japanese to me but I started suspecting they were not after my failure to sort out the signature. Help me!

it's all Romulan to me

A Japanese 'his and her's' yunioni set, hence the size difference. The kanji stamp is probably a kiln mark. Or possibly a shortened version of the potter's name which can be very hard to read, even if you're Japanese. I'm afraid I dont read kanji.

Thanks for your comment NaomiM. Yep, a meoto yunomi set. Meoto means "couple" and yunomi means "drinking water" which is synonymous with "cup". The larger cup is traditionally for the husband and the smaller cup is for the wife. I collect meoto yunomi sets and have quite a few, many in tomobako, some in original cardboard boxes and other loose ones like this set. I studied, spoke and read Japanese years ago when I lived in Japan, but lost most of it over time, and have been relearning the alphabets in the past couple of years as my collecting interests moved to Japanese art. The stamp does not resemble any Japanese characters I am familiar with, though. It is possible that they are highly stylized, but I generally can't read anything except strictly printed characters. I don't think these are Japanese characters, but that does not mean the maker was not a Japanese potter using a stylized stamp.

Some assume, as I did, that meoto yunomi are given as wedding gifts to newly married couples, but I have found that they are also gifted to new acquaintances who are married and sometimes purchased by the couples themselves.

It is also interesting that the Japanese borrowed their writing system from the Chinese hundreds of years ago and there are still enough similarities between the two writing systems to cause confusion.

(forehead slap!) @dantheman! I wonder if the Romulans used a different, more emotional writing system than the Vulcans!? Now I will have to check both.....

I feel pretty confident that they are Japanese but the clay looks like a commercial mix, which points me away from it being by a studio potter or traditional kiln.

Thanks studio-pots! They "feel" like Japanese work in my hand....