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Japan Takes Over The World
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Oh yeah? Well, if you guys are SO great, how come you lost the big one?
Hunt Stevenson, Gung Ho
Pearl Harbor didn't work out so good, so we got you with the VCR.
Before the Japanese economic crash, the U.S. pretty much expected that Japan would be their new Overlords in a decade or two. They were seen as hardworking to the point of being inhuman, and proficient in technology and business; it's as if they were an entire country of super nerds. (It was only later we learned about their brand of nerds.)
The U.S. was prepared, oh yes. A large number of movies and shows set Twenty Minutes Into The Future or later had the U.S. adopting Yen, or all businesses owned by the Japanese.
A Discredited Trope now, as the Japanese Economic Crash of the 1990s deflated the view of inevitable invulnerability.
Actually, the Japanese hypergrowth of the '80s was built on a system of buddy-buddy relationships between various corporations and the government. At the time, this system appeared to be a triumph of modern corporatism, but nowadays, we just call it "crony capitalism". Predictably, this created an unsustainable economy based on loose credit, selling below profit, and *cough* toxic loans. At its peak, property values became massively overinflated, to the point where prime real-estate in Tokyo could sell for more than the entire GDP of smaller countries. Once the bubble popped, the economy stagnated, and Japan entered a "lost decade". Banks became zombie banks, the central bank got its hands stuck in a liquidity trap, and Japanese twenty-somethings faced a fate worse than death: while their fathers had enjoyed lifetime employment at one company, they moved from temp job to temp job, failing to build much in the way of careers. In short, they weren't half as inhuman as the mythos.
This is a Western trope, not an anime trope: if it occurs in that medium, it's just Creator Provincialism.
See also: China Takes Over The World and Yellow Peril. Contrast America Saves The Day.
Examples:
Comic Books
- Crash (the Iron Man graphic novel by Saenz).
- And in Marvel 2099, Stark Industries has become Stark-Fujikawa. This was later toyed with in Present Day Iron Man, most notably with Love Interest Rumiko Fujikawa, whose father briefly owned Stark Industries while Tony was believed dead.
Film
- The movie Blade Runner, though it was a more general "Asia takes over the world".
- Through sheer force of population, no less. "Everybody's gotta be somewhere", indeed.
- Possibly the second Back To The Future movie - Marty works for a man called Fujitsu and calls him "Fujitsu-san". Since Fujitsu is not actually a surname, it's like an American being called "Mr. Kodak".
- The filmmakers actually say on the DVD that they in part based their vision of 2015 on the assumption that Japan would take over the world and heavily influence American culture.
- The Studebaker dealership in 1955 is a Toyota dealer in 1985, but it's a Pontiac dealer in 2015. Standalone Pontiac dealerships (as opposed to Pontiac-Buick-GMC) are already all but extinct, and the Pontiac brand itself will die by 2010...
- Gung Ho, where Japanese businessmen are portrayed as cartoonishly repressed and professional, while Americans are cartoonishly undisciplined and ineffective. Michael Keaton makes a speech toward the end stating that Japan was "kicking America's butt," but the film ultimately pushes an Aesop of compromise and working together.
- Michael Crichton's book-made-movie Rising Sun.
- Also, the book version of Sphere heavily implied a union or at least very heavy influence, between the West and Japan in the time-lost spacecraft's own prior timeline (which would be the future for the world at present in the book).
- All There In The Manual: The un-named Mega Corp 'the Company' in the Alien franchise is named "Weyland-Yutani," a fusion of a Western and an Eastern name.
- Although it does get bought out by Wal-Mart eventually...
- Godzilla vs King Ghidorah has this as the reason why the time travelers try eliminating Godzilla from history in favor of their monster King Ghidorah. Despite his rampaging, Godzilla doesn't seem to affect the Japanese economy too much apparently.
- Lampshaded in one entry in the Millenium series of films, either Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack (what a fantastic film title) or Godzilla Against Mecha Godzilla states that Japan moved the capital to Osaka after the government realised the economic implications of kaiju regularly trashing Japan's capital city.
- Ridley Scott's stylish but dubious 1989 action film Black Rain, in which a tough New York policeman is sent to Japan to solve a murder. The film includes an exchange in which a Japanese cop tells his US counterpart, played by Michael Douglas, that "we make the machines, we build the future, we won the peace", to which Douglas' character replies that even if a Japanese person had an original idea, he would be too up-tight to pull it out of his ass.
- In Robo Cop 3, the Omni Consumer Products Mega Corp gets bought out by a Japanese corporation.
Literature
- William Gibson's trilogy beginning with Neuromancer. Consequently, practically the entire subsequent genre of Cyber Punk has elements of this.
- His subsequent Bridge trilogy, set mostly in the earthquake-ravaged cities of San Francisco and Tokyo, the latter rebuilt using self-constructing nanotech materials, also had quite a bit of this (as well as the China variant), despite having been written during the 1990s. This is partly due to the Tokyo setting, though, and much less pronounced in the Bay Bridge scenes.
- Kurt Vonnegut's novel Hocus Pocus.
- Tom Clancy's Debt of Honor. Notable because it was written in 1994, well after the economic crash. It concludes with an Unfunny Aneurysm Moment in which a rogue Japanese officer crashes an airliner into Washington.
- Robert Silverberg's Hot Sky At Midnight, also written in 1994. In a dystopian future where the Earth's climate has been damaged beyond all repair, two Japanese mega-corps have taken over the world economy and are battling for supremacy: Samurai Industries, based out of Tokyo, and Kyocera-Merck, based out of Kyoto. Most workers are stuck in their company, hoping for a job that has "slope" to a better grade (as in, pay grade). Positions within the company hierarchy are highly stratified, with one's level of clearance determined by position; asking questions beyond your grade is bad for your career health. These positions are known as "Salaryman X", with X being a number (a lower number means a higher rank). Interestingly, just having a "Japanese" name, or being part Japanese, does not guarantee any favourable position; only the "purest" and most dedicated are worthy to ascend the ranks.
- In Snow Crash, a collapse of the world economy has made Japan (Nippon) a major player in a very fragmented, franchised world government.
Live Action TV
- In Max Headroom, the Zik-Zak corporation, which more or less runs the world, is Japanese.
- Late in the series, its Board of Directors are revealed to be Yakuza.
Tabletop Games
Video Games
- Grand Theft Auto: Vice City addresses this one with an in-game commercial of a compact car called "Maibatsu Thunder", and then with another commercial telling people to buy true American muscle instead of Japanese compacts. On the other end of the scale is the "Maibatsu Monstrosity", which is apparently both amphibious and equipped to travel across arctic tundra.
- Similarly, in Grand Theft Auto 2, the largest of the various organizations the player can take missions from is Zaibatsu (presented as the name of a specific megacorporation, not a generic noun).
- While it is a Japanese game developed by a Japanese team and written by a Japanese
troll writer, the treatment of the Tokugawa Corporation in Policenauts is obviously supposed to resemble the way this trope was used in American action movies of the era, rather than Creator Provincialism. (The game is a pastiche of American buddy cop movies.)
Western Animation
- Batman Beyond, being as Cyber Punk as is humanly possible for a show marketed for kids (and toys), features kanji on many of its dark imposing skyscrapers.
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