'Made by' mark characters

The following is basically true for both Chinese and Japanese marks, but was written for Japanese ceramics marks.

There are several characters in Japanese that all mean "made", "made by" or "produced by" or "product of". Their reading may differ. You will understand that these essentially mean the same. By the way, these are exactly the same characters in Chinese, although they do not necessarily the same way on porcelain, their meaning is the same. I write the Japanese (Romaji) reading below.

            1~5 + a basically all mean the same (made)...
1. 制        sei
2. 製        sei
3. 造        zo, tsukuru
4. 製造    seizo
5. 作        saku, tsukuru

(tsukuru is the 'kun' reading, the others are 'on' readings. 'kun' is the reading developed in the native Japanese language, while 'on' are character readings introduced from China at different times; there may be several readings for each of them.)

a. 造作   
a. is an example of another combination of these, but they can be interchanged. It is just a matter of customary usage...

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