Consuming Japan: Cultural Relations and the Globalizing of America, 1973-1993

Abstract

This dissertation explores the U.S. encounter with Japanese goods in the 1970s and 1980s. It argues that this encounter transformed social and cultural life in the United States by ideologically and materially introducing Americans to their first intense, sustained engagement with the processes of contemporary globalization. The dissertation proceeds thematically, first outlining the ideological transformation of American life. While some groups in the United States interpreted Japan's ascendency to economic supremacy as a threat to U.S. national power, others imagined Japan as the harbinger of of globalized future of economic prosperity and cultural homogeneity. Popular cultural representations of Japan reflected such understandings but also addressed the postmodern nature of the Japanese future, framing it as a borderless future in which Japanese corporations limited American political and economic freedoms. The second half of the dissertation examines the material globalizing of America--the U.S. consumption of Japanese goods like automobiles, VCRs, and Japanese animation (anime). The author argues that the popular image of the U.S.-Japan trade conflict during the 1980s obscures the nuances in the relationship that developed at the local level, where Americans consumed goods that transformed their lives, introducing them to new ways of thinking about the world and interacting with other societies engaged in global economic and cultural exchange.