Make Way for Japan By Rowan Callick

With all of the fear, loathing, and envy directed by many Americans toward China—the world’s factory, selling 1 percent of its entire gross domestic product to Wal-Mart alone—it is getting harder to remember that just 20 years ago it was the economic rise of another Asian country that was inspiring an even greater popular furor: Japan. Audiences flocked to “Gung Ho,” Ron Howard’s folksy 1986 film about a Japanese corporation buying up an automobile firm in the Rust Belt. A few years later, Michael Crichton’s racy novel Rising Sun, imagining a Japanese plot to seize control of the U.S. computer industry, sold 200,000 copies. And congressmen were smashing Japanese-made consumer electronics—believed to be competing unfairly—on the lawn of the Capitol.

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