Putting aside the matter of kangaroos,
Originally Posted by
T-Mar
It's also worth noting that the bicycle is symbolized in the company name which means "round and round", as in two (round) wheels.
No it doesn't. The name consists of
maru (round, circular) +
ishi (stone). This is the same ishi that appears in "Ishibashi" (from which "Bridgestone" was derived) and "Ishiwata". But I suspect that "round stone" is a spurious explanation, as there's no imaginable reason why a bike company would want to call itself "round stone". The company's website is disappointingly (and, for a Japanese company, atypically) uninformative about its history. However, the
Japanese Wikipedia article about Maruishi has an (unsourced) chronology that says the company was set up by a Mr Ishikawa as Ishikawa Shōkai in 1894 and reformed as Maruishi Shōkai in 1918. While Ishikawa is a common family name, Maruishi is just an imaginable family name; if it exists, it's rare. However, family names starting with Maru are fairly common: Maruyama, Maruya, etc. My wild guess is that Ishikawa Shōkai either merged with Maru-something-something or that it benefitted from funds injected by Mr Maru-something, and therefore that the "Ishi" of "Ishikawa" was merged with the "Maru" of Maruyama or whatever to create "Maruishi". As a mere guess, this hardly merits the electrons you're reading it with, but at least it's a possibility. That "Maruishi" means "round and round" is not a possibility.