I spent a year in Asahikawa, Hokkaido as an exchange student in 1981. At that time, at least in central Illinois, there was not much awareness of the Japanese pop culture that would become so prevalent later. Though I remember Speed Racer and Godzilla from when I was a kid, Karaoke, Anime and Manga were unknown then. As a matter of fact, I returned to America amidst a wave of Japan bashing due to trade imbalance issues. (Japan, Inc.) This actually didn't subside until Japan's bubble economy burst in the late 1980s. Cyberpunk, which flourished during this era, often showed Japan as a superpower. The kids who were born after I returned from Japan grew up to Japanese-influenced cartoons and the "toy-media industrial complex".

exchangestudent.jpg

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE7DA173EF933A05752C0A964958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=2 http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2005/07/03/weekinreview/03port_CA0ready.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Japanese_sentiment

In the 1970s and 1980s, the waning fortunes of heavy industry in the United States prompted layoffs and hiring slowdowns just as counterpart businesses in Japan were making major inroads into U.S. markets. Nowhere was this more visible than in the automobile industry, where the lethargic Big Three automobile manufacturers (General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler) watched as their former customers bought Japanese imports from Toyota and Nissan, a consequence of the 1973 oil crisis. The anti-Japanese sentiment manifested itself in occasional public destruction of Japanese cars, and in the 1982 murder of Vincent Chin, a Chinese American beaten to death when he was mistaken to be Japanese.

Other highly symbolic deals — including the sale of famous American commercial and cultural symbols such as Columbia Records, Columbia Pictures, and the Rockefeller Center building to Japanese firms — further fanned anti-Japanese sentiment. The unease continued well into the early 1990s.

Popular culture of the period reflected American's growing distrust of Japan. Futuristic period pieces such as Back to the Future II and Robocop 3 frequently showed Americans as working precariously under Japanese superiors. Criticism was also lobbied in many novels of the day. Author Michael Crichton took a break from science fiction to write Rising Sun, a murder mystery (later made into a feature film) involving Japanese businessmen in the U.S. Likewise, In Tom Clancy's book, Debt of Honor, Clancy implies that Japan's prosperity is due primarily to unequal trading terms, and portrays Japan's business leaders acting in a power hungry cabal.

The animosity which peaked in the 1980s, when the term "Japan bashing" became popular, had largely faded by the late 1990s. Japan's waning fortunes, coupled with an upsurge in the U.S. economy as the Internet took off, largely crowded anti-Japanese sentiment out of the popular media, which has turned to other issues.

0465086799.01._SCMZZZZZZZ_.jpg

http://www.aboutfilm.com/movies/b/bladerunner.htm

When Blade Runner was released in 1982, Reagan’s Second Cold War was underway, and the United States was at the tail end of a protracted economic recession, in which being eclipsed by Japan as the world’s economic superpower seemed like a real possibility. In Blade Runner’s future, Japanese businesses and culture have overrun Los Angeles, and the world in general is a bleak, inhospitable place.

http://www.kheper.net/topics/cyberpunk/Neuromancer.htm

(Neuromancer by William Gibson) There is something disquietingly real about a super hi-tech world of cybernetic interfaces and implants, huge urban sprawl, Artificial Intelligence, and Asian Hegemony

http://hesomagazine.com/home/?p=76

Japan has, at least since the 1980’s, been associated with the future. Ridley Scott based the set of his sci-fi classic Blade Runner partly on Osaka. Likewise, William Gibson’s Neuromancer (and a number of his other novels), the book that popularized the term cyberspace along with the cyberpunk genre, was set in partly in Tokyo. Both artists appreciated the hyper-consumerist, apocalyptic atmosphere saturating those cities. The overflow of concrete facades fixed with neon lights screaming shop names at potential customers crowding the streets: millions of ants swarming a discarded six-pack of coke. Those artists, and many others, recognized that testament to ugliness, concrete, and shopping, as a sublime message from the future.

br25.jpg bladerunner.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anime

While anime had entered markets beyond Japan in the 1960s, it grew as a major cultural export during its market expansion during the 1980s and 1990s.

The Internet had played a significant role in the exposure of anime beyond Japan. Prior to the 1990s, anime has had limited exposure beyond Japan's borders. Coincidentally, as the popularity of the Internet grew, so did for anime. Much of the fandom of anime grew through the Internet.

ff_trans_cartoon_f.jpg http://www.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/magazine/15-07/trans_toy

References to Learn More About Japanese Food and Impact on American Culture

「アメリカン・オタク・ピープル列伝」 ("Fierce Legend of American Otaku People") - http://patrickmacias.blogs.com/er/2007/01/legends_of_amer.html

noodleya.jpg

family1976.jpg

(Me and my family in 1976. With us is Keiko, an exchange student from Hiroshima we hosted that summer)

Valid XHTML 1.0! Valid CSS!
Page Execution took real: 1.781, user: 0.160, sys: 0.210 seconds , Memory: 4871840