Those Nips! Remember When They Bought the Empire State Building?

All eyes have focused on China lately, but Japan’s economy is nearly twice as large. More important, the ‘lost years’ of economic stagnation are over. Japan is back, and Japan is different. ROWAN CALLICK looks at why Japan changed, its new reform spirit in economics and politics, and its relations with the U.S. and with its obsession, China.
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.