These titles suck lol. Claws of the Panda? The second pearl harbor? These are things I would name fictional xenophobic books as a joke.
“The Second Pearl Harbor” sounds like a joke title or punchline from an animated comedy
These are things I would name fictional xenophobic books as a joke.
Claws of the Panda sounds like a Tintin book
Hmm, what’s something scary and threatening that I can associate with China? Oh, I know! Pandas!
I’ll be honest, I’d be hard pressed to name many animals strongly associated with specific countries. Off the top of my head:
USA - Bald eagle/American bison
Mexico - Golden eagle
Canada - Caribou
Peru - Alpaca
Bolivia - Guinea pig
Russia - Brown bear
India - Indian elephant/Bengal tiger
China - Giant panda
Australia - a zillion species only native to Australia
Japan - tanuki (raccoon dog)/those macaques that hang out in hot springs
…yup, that’s all I’ve got.
Japan had a huge economic bubble in the 80s that propelled them to one of the highest valued economies in the world. This bubble ended up bursting and costing them a lot of money in the process
There was a huge fear that Japan was overtaking the US in terms of productivity in the late 80s and early 90s. There are even a bunch of legacy Japanese terms in efficiency and productivity spaces today like kaizan, kanban, etc. If you want to see the height of the panic distilled into fiction read Rising Sun or watch the film. It’s some pretty disgusting, but effective, propoganda. The empire needed a new enemy as it was clear by then the US had come out of the cold war on top. Japan was a stand in for the USSR, until the more politically expedient bogeyman of middle-eastern terrorism could be manufactured.
Isn’t this also partly why you saw so much action schlock and cyberpunk-y stuff in the 80s and 90s cast Japanese businessmen and Yakuza as villains?
I think less so with that stuff, tbh. Like most entertainment under capitalism, cyberpunk took an original, groundbreaking work, Gibson’s Neuromancer, and repackaged it to maximize profit. Neuromancer is set in Japan, Chiba City, on Tokyo Bay, so the clones and copycats were trying to mimic that aesthetic. Obviously all art, even bad art, is somewhat a reflection of the society in which it’s produced, so yeah, that anti-Japanese sentiment is there, but I think it’s less a function of intentional propaganda and more trying to make a cheap buck.
I think it was in the air already, even before Gibson. Bladerunner came out in 1982, two years before Neuromancer. Gibson was writing Neuromancer at the time and was stunned the movie had such a similar vibe to the book he hadn’t finished yet.
Bladerunner is definitely expressing an anti-Japanese sentiment by conflating general social decay with an increase in Asian people and culture in Los Angeles.
Japan was just looking like it would overtake the US and america couldn’t cope.
Americans will say shit like “they’re giving our jobs awayto the Japanese and Chinese!” then scoff at the idea of taking ownership over their jobs and workplaces. Bewildering shit. Props to China for simply buying out the means of production :deng-cowboy: American capitalists had no choice, they had a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value :deng-smile:
But then they did the deflation which fucked them up cuz murika told them to, right?
The Plaza Accord? Yeah, the US depreciated the value of its own currency against a handful of its allies to inflate the value of assets outside the US to combat a growing trade deficit. Funnily enough, our allies asked us to do it first, and it took a few years before the US had any interest. It wasn’t until Reagan’s second term, with a trade deficit ballooning out of control from a constant appreciation of the USD, that the US finally agreed to intervene in financial markets. We basically agreed to devalue our own currency to adjust our trade deficit, which had the effect of causing the Japanese, French, and German economies to skyrocket in asset value as the exchange rate of their respective currencies plummeted.
Basically in the 80s America was still a manufacturing powerhouse and we really, really needed our currency to not be worth so much, so that people would still buy our stuff. Then NAFTA came along less than a decade later and shipped all the manufacturing jobs overseas anyway. Whoopsie-daisy, neoliberalism couldn’t see three inches in front of its own nose, again. Damn, wonder why that keeps happening?
Japan reached a point where they were producing cars and electronics of superior quality than domestic US manufacturers and it made US Americans bug out about losing their grip on world domination, much like they are today with China.
At the time Giovanni Arrighi was writing “The Long Twentieth Century,” (published in '95) he predicted Japan would replace the United States position as global hegemon.
