
True Story of the 1980s, When Everyone Was Convinced Japan Would Buy America - amerf1
https://www.businessinsider.com/japans-eighties-america-buying-spree-2014-9#so-in-september-1985-the-g-5-countries-signed-the-plaza-accord-the-non-american-ones-pledged-more-liberal-trade-policies-to-try-to-close-it-7
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gumby
If anyone doesn't remember this (perhaps you weren't around then) it's worth
reviewing this when you read the absurd statements made about China.

Yes China is big, yes china is (still) growing fast, yes China wants to be
more powerful on the world stage. And yes, China raises some challenges/risks
to the western/OECD countries. But the level of the risks as they are today
and in the near future are significantly overblown because to do so is useful
to those who bang the drum.

And china itself faces many internal structural risks which are _underweighed_
(or flat out ignored) both by those who want to tout China as a risk and by
the Chinese government itself.

My favorite deal of the 1980s (1990) was when Martin Davis sold Pebble Beach
to a Japanese developer. This was widely described in the press as evidence
that the Japanese were about to take over the US (OMG the real estate value of
the imperial palace exceeds the entire real estate value of California!!!!).
Of course a few years later it was back in the hands of its original owners,
the Pebble Beach company, for less than the Japanese buyers had paid. Now one
story doesn't make a trend, but this high profile one is indicative of the
situation. Some low-publicity slow-and-steady purchases have done well and the
same in reverse (US companies in Japan). I expect the same with China.

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curuinor
Japan, however, at that point was a liberal democracy with rights and stuff.
Can't say that about the PRC.

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jhwang5
Hmm it's not a democracy in the traditional sense. A single party has been in
power for 40+ years.

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lkrubner
In the USA the Democrats held the House from 1954 to 1994, which is 40 years,
but people felt the USA was still a democracy during this time. Even in
competitive political systems, sometimes one party puts together a broad
coalition that can hold power for decades.

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twblalock
Another example is the UK Conservative Party holding power for 18 years from
1979 to 1997 by winning every election during that period. It would not have
been reasonable to say the UK was not a democracy in that period -- it was
just the case that the voters preferred one party the entire time.

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jedberg
You know how in Back to the Future 2 at the beginning Marty of 2015 works for
a Japanese company? That's because in 1990, when the movie came out, everyone
assumed that you'd work for a Japanese company in 2015.

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chromaton
Also Max Headroom, Neuromancer, Robocop, and a host of others.

The first science fiction that I saw that deliberately bucked this trend was
Earth by David Brin. There's a line something like "Can you believe that back
in the late 20th century everybody thought Nihon was going to control the
world's economy?"

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sct202
I think part of the reason that China seems so scary is that they're way less
developed than Japan was comparatively to the US in the 1980s. So if China's
already threatening at 13% per capita American GDP, imagine what they'll be at
25%.

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mortenjorck
It was surprising to see the fluff listicle format popularized by Buzzfeed
employed in a thoughtful tour of primary sources like this. As an easily-
digestible exploration of the cultural-economic axis of the peak of the
Japanese Miracle, it really worked, even if I kept expecting to see an
animated gif captioned “TFW…”

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vages
Yeah. It took surprisingly long before I realized how similar the format was
(the Voltron point).

I liked it.

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rasz
I dont get this clipart scrap book article, are thy suggesting it blew over,
got back to normal and its all good now like nothing happened? Lets consider
just one example: video/TV industry. Not doing anything in the face of your
market share going down to zero sure showed them!

Frontline: Coming From Japan [The Fall Of The US Television Industry] (1992)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aesJTsZqm6c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aesJTsZqm6c)

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TomMckenny
Hysteria or not, you absolutely do not want foreign countries as rentiers, you
very much want it the other way around.

While trade is not zero-sum, it can be mutually beneficial. But payments for
usage rights are not (whether IP, land, machinery, or even capital). Indeed,
it is one of the core ways 19th century empires extracted wealth from
colonies.

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mcguire
Didn't seem to mention the biggest factor in technology in that era: the
Japanese Fifth Generation Computer Systems:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_generation_computer?wpro...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_generation_computer?wprov=sfla1)

Didn't even mention _Rising Sun_ :
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rising_Sun_%28film%29?wprov=sf...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rising_Sun_%28film%29?wprov=sfla1)

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zozbot123
The 5th gen computing project was ahead of its time to a rather amazing
extent. It literally looks as if they took a peek at what computing technology
has finally achieved in the 2000s and the 2010s, and then tried their best at
reimplementing it from scratch through a 1980s lens.

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equalunique
In similar hubris, many Americans believe Russians control their Democracy.

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benj111
I did GCSE business studies in the 90s. It was basically just Japanese case
studies. I still remember learning about Kaizen, when was the last time anyone
(outside of Japan) used that word?

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rubidium
LOTS of people still use Kaizen outside of Japan. TPS is alive and well.

“Kaizen as a way of life” is the motto for a largely US centric fortune 200.

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benj111
Continuous improvement is alive and well. As I say, I havent seen it called
Kaizen in many years.

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mistermann
That was a very interesting read especially if you try to imagine yourself
being an average person in either country, thanks.

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gullywhumper
Here's a Simpson's reference to Japan taking over:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dacPpadOS1A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dacPpadOS1A)

Longer clip:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qq7wnMvLYg4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qq7wnMvLYg4)

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commandlinefan
I was so convinced that this was inevitable I went ahead and studied Japanese
in college and did a foreign exchange program there, since I figured I'd
surely end up working for a Japanese company. Now I'm a little disappointed
that I've never been able to use my Japanese.

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soneca
The Hollywood version of this is fairly fun:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gung_Ho_(film)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gung_Ho_\(film\))

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empath75
A little bit before that, everyone thought "the Arabs" would buy everything --
see the movie Network. (No, I mean it, see it, it's brilliant).

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lscore720
Michael Crichton gets a bit overzealous with Japan paranaoia in his 1992
novel, Rising Sun

