Sales Help

FOREIGN TRADE Sales Help

On the July night in 1937 when the alleged murder of a Japanese sentry at Peking's Marco Polo bridge (he turned up within a day, A.W.O.L.) furnished a pretext for the invasion of China, Japan's trade with the U. S., its best customer and its best market, started downhill.

Long before the 1938 recession gave U. S. -Japanese trade a final shove down grade, indignant U. S. buyers had begun to boycott Japanese goods, and long before the rape of Nanking Japanese sellers began to feel the pinch. Since Japan had only a pipsqueak gold hoard (published reserve then $261,000,000, now close to zero), Japan's merchant salesmen had to sell more goods in the U. S. before Japan's buyers could get more money to spend in the U. S. market.

But instead of an increase in U. S. buying (which had gone up steadily since 1934), there was a heavy decrease. Japanese sales to Sears, Roebuck fell off 70%, sales to five-and-ten chains dropped, sales of silk and Japanese textiles tumbled. With a good start, Japan's sales to the U. S. at the end of 1937 hit $204,201,000, and from the U. S. it bought $288,558.-ooo. But by the end of 1938 sales to the U. S. dropped to $126.820,000, purchases in the U. S. dropped to $239,620,000 and Japanese merchants could see in black & white what a boycott, a recession and short exchange had done to their business.

Since last winter the Government-subsidized Japan Foreign Trade Bureau has taken offices in San Francisco, in Houston, in Chicago. Two weeks after Germany had made an alliance with Japan's enemy, Russia, grinning Director Suejiro Ogawa of the Chicago bureau decided the time had come to get busy. In the New York Journal of Commerce he ran a full-page advertisement: "Japan is America's Third Largest Customer ... if America would buy more Japanese goods United States exports to Japan could be expanded to even larger proportions."

Week later, to 5,000 businessmen and editors 45-year-old Mr. Ogawa sent a persuasive letter: "My office stands ready . . . to provide any information. . . . Our files on trade . . . are comprehensive and complete." To 50 businessmen who had answered by last week's end, Mr. Ogawa and his six Japanese office helpers had a service to offer. No buyer of materials, like Russia's Amtorg, the Japan Foreign Trade Bureau proposed to act as a two-way middleman: not only to help Japanese dealers find markets in the U. S., but to help U. S. merchants sell in Japan. This sounded good, and it was as good an excuse as any for Japan to get part of her old pal Germany's trade with the U. S.

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