got many things right nearly 40 years ago
its not exactly crazy, looking down the barrel of the cold war and the logical conclusions of that you're going to assume economic depression from all the jobs lost because the government isn't investing in making sure it survives WW3, people trying to justify their jobs leading to more conflicts all over the world either from gay ops or terrorists getting new toys from the surplus of cold war stock, then there's the whole isolationism because we promised the only reason we joined NATO was to protect against a threat that is now dead
(makes you think why you dont see the same with China especially when China has shown genuine military ambition
its mostly because its not as in your face. japan was beating the US in shit people saw everywhere, radios and other electronics and the big one being cars. as far as americans are concerned they fucking invented cars, then japan did them better by the 1980s, along with "high tech" stuff. such as fax machines, plus tons of exports of culture. especially by the late 1980s you had anime and manga clubs popping up in high schools and the first generations of weebs, even before that japanese cinema was constantly talked about by film buffs to the point where you could be a fan of japan and not even bring up cartoons because shit like Kabuki theater and Kurosawa's films and other parts of their culture were being seen as true art by tastemakers at the time. its crazy for people to believe but there were legit dragon ball z fans in america before it even got dubbed, thats how huge japan's cultural exchange was, for fucks sake the Karate kid is literally iconic to the 1980s, as was TMNT. kids grew up with so much jap influence they probably didn't even realize it.
China meanwhile is very one sided, they get different edits of stuff like iron man 3 and media companies censor their products to avoid pissing them off but its not like every commercial break you're seeing an ad for a Chink company thats making something that beats the american competition. you don't have the film auteurs of today obsessed with China's films. your kids aren't going to be watching obvious chink exported cartoons the same way kids were watching robotech in the 1980s. not a single gen alpha is watching Teenage Mutant Triad Rabbits, the biggest film out isn't The Kung Fu Kid.
plus the whole Pearl Harbor thing means a lot of the older generation was fucking pissed about japan and it lead to a big "buy american" thing and even talking about japan being better at stuff pissed off conservatives so you can take a big guess why it popped up constantly in the west's media.
meanwhile up until covid even the left wasn't really OK with china because of their obvious and extreme cultural issues. a lot harder for a feminist to talk about china being better for women when the one child policy would contradict that, same with the death penalty for weed users, as well as media censoring itself so it can be exported there being another sore point for the left pre-2020. plus a big difference in immigrants, japan's students and immigrants in the 1970s/1980s really came off like they were hot shit whereas the chink's students and immigrants treat the US like its spring break and really let loose in a way that implies how fucking awful china is. everyone knows chinese and korean girls are whores, but even the most charismatic dudes in the 1980s had a harder time fucking japanese girls, look at weezer.
plus outside of the korean war which is never given that much respect, the US doesn't have much cultural relations vs Japan, at least it seems that way, people forget about the boxer rebellion. That was actually one of the funnier parts of the latest IP man, everyone called out how silly it would be for a white veteran to dislike chinese people but be super into japan and karate. like just the concept of chinese people being on people's radar enough to treat with any racism would have been a joke up until 2008. if you asked about chinese people in 2007, most people would think about Jackie chan and those marital arts films and the food but have no other frame of refence. like they were the reason we had so much cheap shit in stores thanks to outsourcing but nothing to get people riled up.
the chinese had a similar space to koreans or laotians where you were just groups that people mistook for the Japanese.
Beyond that Japan actually does have a long and beautiful tradition of being great warriors and won quite a few amazing wars and battles in the last quarter millennia. whereas China hasn't really gained territory in the last 250 years and up until 1949 was mainly losing wars and land.
Chinese firms like Tencent operate like ESG rackets. They’ll intervene if anti-CCP material is present in a video game. But Chinese propaganda will vilify Japan so if CDPR or any other developer wants to produce a new cyberpunk video game, making Japanese antagonists is more or less socially acceptable to Chinese investors. Honestly I’m shocked many gamers don’t point out how Beijing has infiltrated the largest entertainment industry over the last decade and used its economy to censor any anti China material in games.
that probably explains a lot too, but its hard to be afraid of a group that constantly makes sure no one treats them like a threat.
