n 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 (
General Motors,
Ford, and
Chrysler) watched as their former customers bought Japanese imports from
Honda,
Subaru,
Mazda, and
Nissan, a consequence of the
1973 and
1979 energy crisis. (When Japanese automakers were establishing their inroads into the USA and Canada. Isuzu, Mazda, and Mitsubishi had joint partnerships with a Big Three manufacturer (GM, Ford, and Chrysler) where its products were sold as
captives). 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,
7-Eleven, 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.[
citation needed] 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
The 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 wrote
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, publicly 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."
[24] 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.