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Selling the American Way: The Singer Sales System in Japan, 1900–1938

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 December 2011

Andrew Gordon
Andrew Gordon
Affiliation:
ANDREW GORDON is the Lee and Juliet Folger Fund Professor of History atHarvard University.
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Abstract

From 1900 through the 1920s, Singer put in place its proven selling system in Japan, despite making remarkably little adjustment to local conditions, and with a fair degree of success. But the company was hurt in the long run, with a turning point in the early- to mid-1930s, by its refusal to adapt—as its local competitors did—to the expectations of employees and the limited means of potential customers. Singer's dramatic rise and fall in Japan reveals ways in which practices of global capitalism are simultaneously transformed and transformative as they take root in particular locales.

Type
Articles
Information
Business History Review , Volume 82 , Issue 4: A Special Issue on Salesmanship , Winter 2008 , pp. 671 - 699
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 2008

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References

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32 In preparing Figure 1, I have excluded machines sold by Singer's Manufacturing Trade Division (MTD), about 10 percent of the total, which were purchased by garment factories and other industrial producers (shoes, Japanese tabi socks).

33 Carstensen, American Enterprise in Foreign Markets, 62–64.

34 Ibid., 64.

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66 “Yōkyūsho,” Gaimushō kiroku, 427, gives prices for comparable machines offered by Singer (250 yen), Husqvarna (170), Montross (140), Control (120), and the Japanese maker, pine (95).

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74 Ibid., 39–40, cites the diary of Francis Hall, who recorded a conversation with Manjirō to this effect in July 1860.

75 Shingaa saihō, in “Monbusho kaji kagaku tenrankai shuppin, saihō mishin ni kansuru setsumei sho” [Explanation of Sewing Machine Use, for Ministry of Education Exposition of Household Sciences], 30 Oct. 1918. Gakuji kankei kenmei mokuroku (Tokyo-fu, Tokyo-shi). Held at Tokyo Metropolitan Public Records Office.

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