In the 1970s and 1980s, the waning fortunes of heavy industry in the United States prompted layoffs and hiring slowdowns just as counterpart businesses in Japan were making major inroads into U.S. markets. Nowhere was this more visible than in the automobile industry, where the lethargic Big Three automobile manufacturers (General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler) watched as their former customers bought Japanese imports from Toyota and Nissan, a consequence of the 1973 oil crisis. The anti-Japanese sentiment manifested itself in occasional public destruction of Japanese cars, and in the 1982 murder of Vincent Chin, a Chinese American beaten to death when he was mistaken to be Japanese. Other highly symbolic deals — including the sale of famous American commercial and cultural symbols such as Columbia Records, Columbia Pictures, and the Rockefeller Center building to Japanese firms — further fanned anti-Japanese sentiment. Popular culture of the period reflected American's growing distrust of Japan. Futuristic period pieces such as Back to the Future Part II and Robocop 3 frequently showed Americans as working precariously under Japanese superiors. The film Blade Runner showed a futuristic Los Angeles clearly under Japanese domination (with a Japanese majority population and culture), perhaps a reference to the alternate world presented in Man In The High Castle written by Philip K. Dick, the same author on which the film was based, in which Japan had won World War II. Criticism was also lobbied in many novels of the day. Author Michael Crichton took a break from science fiction to write Rising Sun, a murder mystery (later made into a feature film) involving Japanese businessmen in the U.S. Likewise, In Tom Clancy's book, Debt of Honor, Clancy implies that Japan's prosperity is due primarily to unequal trading terms, and portrays Japan's business leaders acting in a power hungry cabal. As argued by Marie Thorsten, however, Japanophobia mixed with Japanophilia during Japan's peak moments of economic dominance during the 1980s. The fear of Japan became a rallying point for techno-nationalism, the imperative to be first in the world in mathematics, science and other quantifiable measures of national strength necessary to boost technological and economic supremacy. Notorious "Japan-bashing" took place alongside the image of Japan as superhuman, mimicking in some ways the image of the Soviet Union after it launched the first Sputnik satellite in 1957: both events turned the spotlight on American education. American bureaucrats purposely pushed this analogy. In 1982, Ernest Boyer, a former U.S. Commissioner of Education, publically declared that, "What we need is another Sputnik" to re-boot American education, and that "maybe what we should do is get the Japanese to put a Toyota into orbit." Japan was both a threat and a model for human resource development in education and the workforce, merging with the image of Asian-Americans as the "model minority." Both the animosity and super-humanizing which peaked in the 1980s, when the term "Japan bashing" became popular, had largely faded by the late 1990s. Japan's waning economic fortunes in the 1990s, known today as the Lost Decade, coupled with an upsurge in the U.S. economy as the Internet took off largely crowded anti-Japanese sentiment out of the popular media. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanophobia The term Japan bashing, or Japan-bashing, is a term referring to anti-Japanese sentiment. The term was first coined in the early 1980s by Robert C. Angel, a paid lobbyist for the Japanese government. At the time, Angel was president of the Washington-based Japan Economic Institute, an organization financed and overseen by Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Wanting to counter growing US protectionism and suspicion at the time about the growing Japanese economy and their rapid entry into consumer electronics, the US automotive market and buying of number of high profile US companies and buildings, Angel searched for a way to discredit Japan critics by insinuating their criticism was based on racism and xenophobia. "I looked around for a phrase to use to discredit Japan's critics," Angel later said. "And I hoped to be able to discredit those most effective critics by lumping them together with the people who weren't informed and who as critics were an embarrassment to everybody else." He tried out the term "anti-Japanism" in speeches and interviews, but it did not catch on. Then he tried "Japan bashing". The term quickly caught on and gained widespread popularity. "The first people to pick up on it were the Japanese press," Angel said. "However, within a year the American press began to use the term." The term became a weapon in the public relations war being waged in Washington over trade policy and U.S.-Japanese economic relations. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_bashing

• published: 04 May 2014
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