This insightful book explores the intense and ultimately fleeting
moment in 1980s America when the future looked Japanese. Would
Japan's remarkable post–World War II economic success enable
the East Asian nation to overtake the United States? Or could
Japan's globe-trotting corporations serve as a model for battered
U.S. industries, pointing the way to a future of globalized
commerce and culture? While popular films and literature recycled
old anti-Asian imagery and crafted new ways of imagining the
"yellow peril," and formal U.S.-Japan relations remained locked in
a holding pattern of Cold War complacency, a remarkable shift was
happening in countless local places throughout the United States:
Japanese goods were remaking American consumer life and injecting
contemporary globalization into U.S. commerce and culture. What
impact did the flood of billions of Japanese things have on the
ways Americans produced, consumed, and thought about their place in
the world?
From autoworkers to anime fans,
Consuming Japan introduces
new unorthodox actors into foreign-relations history, demonstrating
how the flow of all things Japanese contributed to the globalizing
of America in the late twentieth century.