Word: japanism
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Since the bursting of Japan's financial bubble 20 years ago, moreover, many observers have noted that Japanese society has become more "Japanese," cherishing tradition and homegrown values - a phenomenon that TIME's Hannah Beech a year ago called Japan's "discovery of Japan." Perhaps tellingly, the number of Japanese students at U.S. universities has declined in the last decade; there are now fewer Japanese students in the U.S. than Chinese or Indian ones. How Japanese is Japan? Well, consider this datum: Junichiro Koizumi, who led Japan from 2001 to 2006, and who in terms of economic-policy terms...
...look at the relationship from the U.S. perspective. For many years, there has been a layer of academics, policymakers and others politicians in the U.S. who have devoted their professional lives to the relationship with Japan. Countless Americans drive a Japanese car or use Japanese consumer electronics. At the same time, anyone who remembers the depth of anti-Japanese feeling over trade issues in the 1980s will need no reminding that familiarity with Japanese goods does not translate into popular political support for Japanese interests...
...comparison with China is inevitable. Many U.S. businesses have seen Japan's companies as rivals in international and American markets. But in the case of China, the business relationship is quite different. China does not yet have many obvious competitors to U.S firms, though one day it will. At present, not only is China itself a huge and growing market for American firms, but those businesses increasingly source their goods in China - in a way that few have in Japan. That has created a "thickness" to the economic relationship with China of a sort that has not been so marked...
...more reason for official Washington to take Japan seriously. The U.S. is going to have to display sophisticated diplomacy in Asia over the next 20 years, easing China's rise to international prominence while helping to ensure that democratic allies such as Japan do not feel threatened by it. To show how important the alliance with Japan used to be considered, the U.S. for many years appointed seasoned politicians to the Embassy in Japan - Senators Mike Mansfield and Howard Baker, former Vice-President Walter Mondale and Speaker of the House Tom Foley. The pattern was broken when Baker retired after...
...American system, there's nothing obviously wrong in making such ambassadorial choices; Roos may turn out to be an excellent envoy. But at this particular juncture in Asian politics, it was inevitable that the appointment looked like an opportunity missed. The U.S.-Japan alliance really has been important to stability in Asia, but its foundations, in my view, have never been quite as secure as its boosters have liked to assert. The Japanese election - it becomes clearer every day - represents a real sea-change in politics there. If the alliance is not now to drift into irrelevance, or worse, some...