Was the 1980s Japan fearmongering ever realistic to begin with?

In hindsight, it seems it should have been obvious that a nation with a real estate bubble, few natural resources, operating near peak efficiency already, near maximum potential already, large national debt, and less than half the USA’s population, could never have posed a true economic threat to ‘take over the world’ or anything like that.

Why did the 1980s Japan scare have any traction to begin with?

Because what it really pointed to was that the USA was shitting the bed. It still is. There were a number of things that Japan was doing better that the USA was/is not matching. Examples :

Health care. It’s blindingly obvious that the delivery of healthcare is a monopoly/oligopoly. There are a finite number of medical school seats, so doctors have a monopoly on physician services (and there are not enough doctors being trained). There are a finite number of hospital networks in a given city, so patients have no actual choice of competing providers. Misinformation as to the actual quality level of medical services is rampant. (some doctors and hospitals are better than others. But everyone lies about how good they actually are, and patients have no way to tell the difference)

So 12% of GDP or something flushes down the toilet versus the actual value of those medical services. The Japanese actually live longer.

Legal. The actual USA court system is designed mostly to enrich lawyers at the expense of everyone else. Principles of fairness and justice are mostly bullshit, which is why you can’t get a fair hearing without spending tens of thousands on lawyers. Another chunk of GDP gone.

Education. There is not universal access to the schooling needed to get a competitive, productive job. Those PhDs in history and theoretical physics should probably only go to the people willing to pay for them and who have the grades. But the mainline, most useful degrees should be obtainable for free for worthy students (aka anyone who has a statistical likelihood of passing).

It really ought to just be an extension of high school, with a job guaranteed or some form of work 6 months and study 6 months or something.

Hm, I’ve actually heard bad things about the Japanese legal and educational systems.

I wasn’t old enough to really pay attention in the 80s…was the Japanese “threat” really healthcare or law systems? The only references I ever see in 80s movies are to Japan dominating business and manufacturing - it’s all about the US not being the economic powerhouse anymore. Never noticed actual well-being of citizens referenced. Then again, I have about three references to go by, and one of the is the Back to the Future movies. :o

No…it was the exact same sort of job protectionism and US-centric view on labor we have today, it’s just shifted from a fear that Japan would steal all of those gods given/government protected jobs to Outsourcing™ and Offshoring(ARR) fears that boil down to the same attitude.

The U.S. was coasting, resting a bit on its laurels, and the Japanese made us work to catch up to the standards of excellence (I’m speaking specifically of car-making) that were, after all, well within our reach.

There was a period of time during which Japanese-made cars were vastly better than American models.

As a market-driven giant among economies, we got the message, and American cars, these days, are pretty good. Competition works like that.

The “We’re going to die!” and “Tokyo will own us” hyperbole was stupid.

Japan was very Gung Ho about their car industry.

It was also, IIRC, the buying of real estate during the Japanese economic boom (though I believe now that a lot of those purchases are now in different hands).

It wasn’t THAT stupid. NOw, we’re doing better, but, American finances and business sucked dicks big time, back then. US cars, see Cordoba, Mustang, Granada, EverycarmadeinAmerica, etc… for shit production standards. Honda and every other Japanese vehicle producer were kicking butt on the fuel economy aspect. In the early 80s, we were still battling 20+ percent interest rates, so, any business standard better than ours was, mol, by default, better than ours. Japanese investments in the US, since they had so much US money, increased exponentially. Sony came along and sucked up all of the electronics big bucks, and electronics were a megagigantic industry: Walkman, boomboxes, switchover to CDs, remote controls,etc… The Japanese were having a huge increase in GNP, or whatever it’s called now, (IIRC, it didn’t slow down till the late 90s) while the US was trying to play catch up, all of our money was going to Japan.

Your OP looks at the situation at a remove of 30 +/- years. Compare the US in about 2009-2011 to a nation that was thriving, had almost NO unemployment, huge leaps in GNP/GDP, and investing in US land/business/money markets, and owning huge shares, and you can see where the idea was quite reasonable.

handsomeharry: I agree that hindsight assists in putting the threat into proper proportion, but it was, even at the time, disproportionate. It was never a true danger to the U.S. economy. It was, instead, a much-needed prod of competition, to rouse us to perform better.

It’s a little like the situation now with China. It’s completely foolish to imagine that they will seize economic control over the entire Pacific Rim, or use their share of the U.S. debt to compel us to obey them. They’re a magnificent competitor, but they aren’t going to be dominating world finance any time soon.

The U.S. has, for a very long time, suffered from paranoid delusions, but the fact is, we’re as secure, fat, happy, safe, rich, and well-fed as any nation in history has ever been. If China unleashed total economic warfare against us, we’d go through a nasty recession…and a hundred million Chinese would starve.

The difference is - China’s population is 11 times larger than Japan’s. China is not a US ally and is only beginning to grasp its potential. Vastly different situation.

Also, few people grasp how high the upper limits actually are. I’m not saying China will reach this development level in their latest growth spurt, but self replicating machinery and artificial intelligence are physically possible things that they might potentially develop in this run. If you have that, you have the technology to tear apart planets and grow industry to levels you can barely imagine.

Well…that works, kinda, for me, because I’m mostly minimizing the threat that Japan posed thirty years ago.

I’m not much afraid of China, today, and thus I was justified in being much less afraid of Japan back in '85, when their economy was that much smaller, and they actually were a U.S. ally.

Their workers often voluntarily did the Night Shift.

Batman!

I don’t much about their legal system, but my college roommate, who’s now a lawyer studied their criminal legal system and was shocked at how much power the cops had and how, in his mind, unfair to the defendants the legal system was. I don’t remember any details though nor how the that would negatively affect Japan’s standing in the world.

I don’t remember the ‘scare’ being that Japan would ‘take over the world’.
Just that it was on the rise, in the sense that the days of being copy-cats were over, and that their work ethic was higher than ours
Besides the car gap, Japan was also on the rise in computer and consumer electronics.

Well, but that is exactly what many were and are paranoid about: that we’re secure, fat, happy and rich (though higly leveraged) and thus in their worldview have nowhere to go but down. That some leaner, hungrier competitor with cash on hand will knock us off the perch. There is a large segment of Americans with an image of the society as “fat and contented” and having lost our vigor so that we would be unable to handle a comparable competitor making us sweat to hold our ground. The entry of Japanese capital into large scale real estate speculation in the US just scared a lot of them because they could not wrap their minds around the notion of Americans selling their lands, buildings or companies to capital from outside the Anglosphere or Western Europe (see also: “Arab oil sheiks”)

I guess it just seems absurd to me that falling to a position of the second most rich, happy, comfortable, and satisfied country in the world was seen as the equivalent of the total collapse of our way of life.

(The fact that, today, we’re somewhere around 20th in several measures of quality of life notwithstanding.)

The American Exceptionalism fantasy demands that we are Number One or else bilge, leaving out the fact that there’s a vast amount of space in between.

When you start at number 1, and you have vast material and human resources - dwarfing everyone else - you really have to screw the pooch to end up even at number 2. That’s the problem. As I argued above, I can point to gaping flaws in America as a system that suck resources away that could go to increasing our economic output and median standard of living.