Rosen Enterprises

https://segaretro.org/images/1/1e/RosenEnterprises_logo.png

Rosen Enterprises
Founded: 1953
Defunct: 1965-07-15
Merged with: Nihon Goraku Bussan (1965-07-15)
Merged into: Sega Enterprises, Ltd.
Headquarters: 75 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10003, United States Reader's Digest Building, 1-chōme-1-1 Hitotsubashi, Chiyoda, Tokyo 100-0003, Japan
1965-07-15 Sega Enterprises, Ltd. →

Rosen Enterprises, Ltd. (ローゼン・エンタープライゼ) was a Japanese import company founded by David Rosen. Operating from 1953 to 1965, the company largely popularized the shooting gallery concept in the country, and also established a boom in automatic photo machines. Following increasing market competition, Rosen merged the firm with Nihon Goraku Bussan in July 1965, forming the foundations of Sega Enterprises, Ltd.

History

From 1949 to 1952, Rosen was deployed with the U.S. Air Force in eastern Asia for the Korean War, traveling to China and South Korea before being stationed in Okinawa. After the war, Rosen returned to New York for a short period of time, as he had actually established "Rosen Enterprises" in Japan before he was discharged and had the idea of furthering that company's interest in the United States. However, he returned to Japan before having such an opportunity.

Rosen Enterprises focused on art; he hired artists who were unemployed by the post-War recession in Japan to create portrait paintings based off photographs. A company in the United States was established to do this as a business whereby the photos would be sent back to Japan, the portraits would be done and the company would send the photo. That business met with mixed results. However, Rosen noticed a problem in the Japanese market: the need for identification photos.

Photorama

In the 1950s, Japanese citizens needed an photo ID for virtually everything: school applications, employment, ration cards, and more. Traditional photo studios of the era generally charged customers 250 yen, with photos taking 2 or 3 days to be developed, and few other alternatives available to the average consumer. To contrast, the United States hosted a market for popular automated photomat booth, where customers could enter a publicly-available booth and pay 25 cents to receive a series of four instant photographs.

Looking to enter this market, Rosen Enterprises began investigating into the subject further. Upon submitting the photos produced by photomat machines to longevity testing, David Rosen discovered that a lack of temperate control inside the booths would eventually render the photos faded and unsuitable for ID photos after only a couple years. In particular, the existing machines lacked temperature control systems because most Americans were reportedly disinterested in getting a longer-lasting photo. In his designs for a new version of the hardware, Rosen decided to staff each booth with a live human, who would properly develop each set of photographs from a small enclosure behind the machine.

Rosen Enterprises founder David Rosen

The company proceeded to acquire existing American photomat booths, redesigning them to their specifications and importing them into Japan in the beginning of 1954. Known under the new name of Photorama, these booths charged from 150 to 200 yen, and developed photographs in just a few minutes. These booths soon became a financial success - with over 100 new booths installed across Japan over the following year - and gaining the popular nickname nifun shashin (二分写真, lit. "Two Minute Photo".) During particular times of the year which demanded a large number of ID photographs taken, such as yearly school applications, it was not uncommon for customers to wait in Photorama lines for hours on end.

Photorama was so successful that traditional Japanese photo studios banded together and publicly voiced their protest to the American Consulate. The Consulate proceeded to call Rosen Enterprises directly to inform him of their concerns of unfair business practices. As a result, David Rosen worked out one of the earliest franchising deals in Japan, agreeing to make the Photorama system available for third-party franchisees. Rosen Enterprises would remain the hardware's proprietary supply supplier, and ended up opening another 100 booths after this deal was finalized.

Following increased competition in the photo booth industry, Rosen Enterprises officially wound down their Photorama division in the early 1960s.

Coin-op imports

Around 1956-57, the Japanese economy had recovered to the point where most people had some form of disposable income, and for the first time, there was a little time for entertainment. Up until the mid-1950s, most Japanese companies worked a full six days, and in smaller companies it wouldn't be unusual to work 6 1/2 days. This free time made Rosen consider entering the entertainment business; the popular entertainment at that point in time in Japan was Pachinko and dance studios and bars and cabarets. Given Service Games' cornering of the slot machine and jukebox markets, Rosen Enterprises turned to coin-op games.

At the time, electro-mechanical coin-operated games were limited, as there were only a handful of manufacturers and nearly all were centered in Chicago; it was a stagnant industry in the United States. Each manufacturer produced 4 to 6 non-pinball games a year. Rosen came to the United States with the idea he would find coin-op games suitable for Japan, who at the time had a cultural interest in hunting and shooting. He then returned to convince the Ministry of International Trade and Industry of Japan to give him a license to import the machines, which were classified as luxury items. After a year of negotiation, he was granted a license to import $1000,000 worth of merchandise.

Rosen became known as a very live customer in the United States, because most distributors had warehouses filled up with used equipment that they really had no marketplace for. In those years trade-ins were a very big part of any distributors business. So when the operator buy a game, two years later he would trade it in. At that time games primarily new were, distributor price to the operator was around $700-750. However, distributors would do trade-ins where they took older machines along with cash, and these used machines just sat in warehouses. The average machine from the United States, when purchased used, cost roughly $200, but duties in Japan, which included shipping costs, were around 200 percent.

Right off the bat, the machines were tremendously successful, with gameplay priced at 20 yen. Given the exchange rate of the time, this equaled a nickel a play. At that time play in the United States was 10 cents, so the parity was 2 for 1. Return on a machine generally were within two months. Popular imported games included Seeburg's "Chicken Sam", "Shoot the Bear" and "Coon Hunt", which all focused on shooting targets. The company stripped the cabinets off the machine, just keeping the mechanisms, and creating the jungle environment and trees and such. They would take one into the arcade and do this, and put these mechanisms behind so all that could be seen was the bear running in the jungle or the raccoon running up and down the trees.

Based on Rosen Enterprises' initial Photorama experience, they worked out a very good relationship with various movie studios, primarily Toho and Shursheko, so that they made their locations available for the company to place their games in. In the case of Toho, the company had an arcade either adjoining or in the lobby of every one of their theaters. At that point, Rosen had the civilian marketplace exclusively for 18 to 24 months before other companies learned how they were importing and under what classification because every importation has certain classifications. They applied under the classification Rosen used and became competitors. The two companies that were most involved were Taito and Nihon Goraku Bussan, or Service Games. Taito had a fair-sized jukebox operation going when they entered the arcade business. Nihon Goraku Bussan had a very very large jukebox operation going on at that time, possibly the largest and had a factory for manufacturing slot machines that were sold to the military.

In 1964 going into 1965, the owners of Nihon Goraku Bussan and Rosen had discussions about merging. They were the larger company based on their jukebox operation. They also owned property and a factory, which Rosen did not. In fall 1965, the two companies decided to merge. In trying to establishing the name of the company, they Sega was the best known name cause it was their brand name and took Enterprises from Rosen Enterprises, because Rosen wasn't a brand name, it was just a company. The company became known as Sega Enterprises Ltd.

Magazine articles

Main article: Rosen Enterprises/Magazine articles.

Promotional material

Print advert in Cash Box (US) #1963-04-06: "April 6, 1963" (1963-04-06)

External links

• The Early History of Sega - Rosen Enterprises article by Keith Smith at The Golden Age Arcade Historian