Nipponophone was the first Japanese-made gramophone. It was produced by the Nippon Phonograph Company which, after tieing up with the Columbia Graphophone Company, became Nippon Columbia (confusingly, not related to Columbia Records which is part of Sony). The company also used the Nipponophone name for a record label. Cheekily, they lifted the image of Nipper listening to "his master's voice" on the gramophone and substituted Buddha for the dog:
Images from Airform Archives.
When the company started producing it's own media, they built a factory in Kawasaki which was capable of producing 200,000 records and 5,000 phonographs a month. At the time, this made it one of the largest facilities in the world. One of the earliest services the company offered was supplying overseas music to Japan's foreign residents. This website has full scans of one of their early catalogues and includes some Japanese music "which will give a good representation of Oriental music to the Occidental". A separate website has a full bilingual catalogue of players dating from 1912 which features the famous "Nipponola". It was yours for 60 yen.
