7 Comments
Oct 23, 2021Liked by John Ganz

The anti-Japanese thing of that era always felt like it had one foot in WW2 and one foot in the collapse of the Soviet Union. The fact that you couldn’t park a Japanese car in a VFW parking lot seemed more of the former, but the Crichton stuff felt like the latter. Even at the time, the transition from Japan as the cultural bad guy to Islam as the cultural bad guy after the onset of the lost decades always felt like the powers that be were saying, “well, how about we try this one?”

On a side note, the Ron Howard/Michael Keaton movie Gung Ho was the first of the Japan bashing movies that I remember, and it preceded Black Rain by a few years.

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Oct 23, 2021Liked by John Ganz

A classic of the genre is "The War in 2020" (1991) by retired Lt. Col Ralph Peters.

USA fighting Japan in the broken USSR.

Peters has spent much of the time since then as an "expert" on war on Fox News.

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Oct 23, 2021Liked by John Ganz

It was the beginning of the end for Japan-phobia when George H.W. Bush puked on the Prime Minister's lap.

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Oct 23, 2021Liked by John Ganz

Very well done, John!

There was a group of respectable writers writing critically about Japan during this period. Von Wolferen, Chalmers Johnson, Clyde Prestowitz and, in a measured thoughtful way, James Fallows. In Japan, they were referred to in Japan as the “revisionists.” Von Wolferen’s book actually is very good. Interestingly, he has gone completely off the rails believing the 9/11 attack was a false flag and the Covid epidemic has been fabricated. Knowing the author’s trajectory, when one goes back to the “Enigma” book, which I think was essentially correct in its analysis, you do read Van Wolferen’s half-paranoid insights into connections and networks of influence differently.

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This was really interesting, particularly how it puts current fears about China in their historical context. I am pretty young, so hearing about how much Americans feared Japan's ascendency is like opening a time capsule from before I was born. Maybe in a few decades we'll all be terrified of India or Nigeria.

Unrelatedly, given that you are something of a 1990s-ologist, and that you've written about both Perot and Yang, I'm curious to hear what you think about Yang's new Forward Party. There might be some interesting parallels there – two anti-establishment politicians with idiosyncratic views founding vaguely techno-capitalist, "radical centrist" parties to challenge the "duopoly."

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founding
Nov 3, 2021Liked by John Ganz

I think Speilberg's 1979 Movie 1941 is worth mentioning in the context of this essay. At least as a harbinger and foreshadowing of what the next decade would hold. I remembered it because I was in high school and a big Belushi fan. The gags and stereotypes seem mostly dated now, if not then, and I remember being dissapointed and saying, "this was no Animal House"

There was a pretty funny gag near the end though where a Japanese soilder was trying to get a stolen radio into his submarine and it was too big to fit. In his frustration he says..."we have to figure out how to make these smaller". A very telling moment that perhaps provides insight into the fears of the late 80s.

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Oct 24, 2021Liked by John Ganz

As a coda, there's also Tom Clancy's Debt of Honor, which came out in '94 and featured a demogogue having taken over a despondent Japan on the economic backfoot

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