Hanjosuru Shobaiburi: Beikoku Kenbutsu [Prosperous Business Behavior: A Look at the United States]

Tokyo: Jitsugyo No Nihonsha, 1927. Very good.. [2],4,2,3,9,289,[16]pp., plus four halftone photographic plates. Numerous halftone photographs and illustrations printed in the text. Publisher's light blue cloth, spine stamped in gilt, front cover stamped in black. Original cardboard slipcase, stamped in black on spine and front cover. Minor wear and dust-soiling, light edge wear. A Japanese businessman's rare report on American retail store operations based on a tour he made in the mid-1920s. The author had been an executive with Hoshi Pharmaceuticals, a Japanese company that began as a drug manufacturer, and in the 1920s expanded into a network of retail stores throughout Asia based on the American chain store model. The company's founder, Hoshi Hajime, contributes a preface to this book. Timothy Yang explored Hoshi Pharmaceuticals' growth and adaptation of American retail methods (among other topics) in A Medicated Empire (Columbia University Press, 2021). The present work is not cited by Yang, perhaps because the online cataloging for the book does not identify Hoshi's contribution.

The photographic plates in the book feature street scenes in America showing advertising, roadside billboards advertising products such as Oh Henry candy bars, and a farm-to-market scene. The in-text halftone photographs and illustrations depict stores, advertisements, retail fixtures, and more, such as a page from the Sears & Roebuck catalogue, a schematic drawing of an American retail store, a shot of canned goods stacked on a store shelf, an illustrated display for Gillette razors, and so forth. OCLC records just two copies in Japan and a placeholder record with no copies noted.