Calfskin, It seems you post your distorted, shrunken view of Japanese business history a couple of times a year whenever the opportunity presents itself. Entering a market at a certain price point, for beginner level instruments, does not mean one is dedicated to low quality products, fooling the public, or foistering a fraud.
Someone asked a question and I simply answered it. Read what I actually said, instead of interpreting it incorrectly. I will repeat in a different way.
The developing Japanese economy ,after the U.S. occupation ended desperately needed cash. Japan's domestic market was limited to uniquely Japanese goods + a small amount of demand for what the populace had seen during the occupation. They had to export but there was no demand in the west(mainly America) for anything they traditionally produced.Things, Japanese were treated with much suspicion. The Japanese did not underestimate the consumer greed in the west, so they gravitated to producing cheap copies of known western products along with, bubblegum machine trinkets, tools made out of white metal ,plastic geraniums for window boxes,hallowe'en masks, funny little cars that rusted out in 5 years and 2 stroke motorcycles that needed a ring job every 1000 miles, amongst other things. You know what, though; North Americans loved it , because it was cheap . Germany wasn't allowed to have patents after the war ,so they copied every German camera, microscope,binocular or telescope they could get their hands on. They toyed with Rotary engines, copying the revolutionary ,Wankel and to the point of this thread, they copied dozens upon dozens of original western musical instrument designs. The reason they gravitated towards, Slingerland was because ,Slingerland could have cared less. There was no lawsuit there.
Now ,if you were a company that had begun by assembling low grade copies of another company's goods and sold them under 50 different names, primarily through second rate retail outlets and then progressed to in house development , with original designs and a world class reputation, why would you want to keep records of and fawn over a period in time when things were desperate and the intent was to sell as many units of clearly substandard product, as possible , at a paltry profit margin, to wanking American teenagers? I hope ,they do find records because it will tell the story much the way I have painted it.
