[DavidPiper]

As a young(ish) person, I've definitely heard "fyi this is a CHINESE business", but haven't really heard "fyi this is a JEWISH business" or "fyi this is a JAPANESE business".

Are there communicable/generalised messages or stereotypes people are trying to invoke with this sort of thing, or have they always just been intended as slander?

[tuatoru]

I can't speak to "Jewish", but I can to "Japanese".

It relates to Japan's industrial rise after WWII.

In the 1950s, "Japanese" was synonymous with "shoddy and cheap". The stereotypical import from Japan was an HB pencil.

In the 1980s, "Japanese" became synonymous with "cheap and reliable" -- think Toyota vs General Motors. American manufacturers responded with racism rather than fixing their problems.

There was hysteria in the mainstream media that Japan was going to overtake the US to become the biggest economy in the world. People who see the world in zero-sum terms made idiots of themselves.*

In the 2010s, "Japanese" seems to have become synonymous with "advanced and very high quality". "Japanese capacitors" on computer motherboards, for instance.

And now that the Chinese are here, we've always been best buddies with Japan.

To some extent this same sequence is happening with South Korea and Taiwan, and possibly Israel.

* There's a famous essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" which goes some way to describing this zero-sum, win-or-lose thinking in politicians. The first few paragraphs read like they could have been written this year.

https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-am...

[bsder]

> There was hysteria in the mainstream media that Japan was going to overtake the US to become the biggest economy in the world. People who see the world in zero-sum terms made idiots of themselves.*

To be fair, the Japanese, through MITI subsidies, slaughtered the US semiconductor industry through the early 80s.

It took a lot of US government funding through VHSIC and the VLSI Project to prevent semiconductors from collapsing completely.

People too often assume that "things will work out" after the fact when sometimes it took great efforts up front to make it that way.

Of course, I'm originally from the Rust Belt of the US, so I have a front row seat to "Yeah, things don't always work out."

[CamperBob2]

It took a lot of US government funding through VHSIC and the VLSI Project to prevent semiconductors from collapsing completely.

What are some specific examples? I don't remember anything like that happening. Japan had Hitachi and Matsushita and Toshiba, but we had Motorola and Intel and NatSemi and TI and countless other dominant players. There was plenty of room in the market for both.

[bsder]

Please remember that the only thing which had any real volume in that time (1985 and prior) period was dynamic RAM. DRAM drove semiconductor process development until microprocessors eventually took over as defining the process capabilities (about 1990-ish).

The US DRAM manufacturers got absolutely destroyed by the Japanese ones. So much so that getting out of DRAM was an existential crisis moment for Intel.

One big point of the crux was scan lithography vs step and repeat lithography. You needed step and repeat lithography to get to the next level, but it was way more complicated than scan lithography. The US companies made the jump--the Japanese ones didn't. The Japanese companies clobbered the US companies in terms of profitability and production.

This is part of the origin of "never be first" in the semiconductor industry.

The US government then stepped in and pumped a massive amount of money behind semiconductor tech to stabilize that. Of course, once step and repeat (and some other related technologies) went online, the Japanese DRAM companies now got slaughtered and basically driven out of business.

Things don't always "just work out" and sometimes the game really does create "winners and losers".

[simondotau]

This change in attitudes was dramatised in 1985's Back To The Future.

  Doc Brown (from 1955)

        (Inspects the failed circuit)
    "Unbelievable that this little piece
    of junk could be such a big problem."
              (Turns it over)
    "No wonder this circuit failed, it
    says made in Japan."

  Marty (from 1985)

    "What do you mean doc, all the best
    stuff is made in Japan."

  Doc Brown

    "Unbelievable."

[balia]

Because it’s no longer socially acceptable. You should look up the history of dogwhistles about Jewish ownership of banks and financial firms. It usually seems harmless, ex: “hey isn’t this owned by a Jewish person?” which masquerades the deep antisemitistic insinuation that Jews are taking over banking and media

[CamperBob2]

There are some striking parallels between China and Japan, not so many between China and Holocaust victims.

In the 1940s, great industrialized nations vied with each other to see who could commit the biggest atrocities on the other guys. Japan lost out, but once set straight, they began an impressive multi-decade recovery.

In the 1950s, Japan's own considerable efforts, along with help from their former enemies, started to pay off. In the US, we were slow to let go of old grudges, though, and the (understandably) poor quality of Japanese exports was a standing joke. As tuatoru points out, anything that said "Made in Japan" was almost guaranteed to be crap, similar to the outlook many people have towards Chinese exports today.

In the 1960s, Japan's reputation as an industrial power was growing, but they were still mostly seen as imitators rather than innovators, again very much like the Chinese are today. The Japanese took an early lead in areas like solid state electronics, exploiting inventions that mostly originated in the West but weren't being used to their full potential in the consumer space. Companies like Honda and Toyota were also starting to sell a few cars here, but nobody took them seriously.

In the 1970s, the gas crunch hit. People stopped laughing at small Japanese cars and started buying them. There was still a lot of latent resentment towards the Japanese, though, coming from everyone from organized auto industry labor who saw their well-feathered nests falling apart, to WWII veterans whose interactions with Japan had proven too traumatic to forgive and forget. Not to mention anti-Asian sentiment being on the upswing as a whole, thanks to Vietnam and the "boat people" who were, of course, "coming to take our jobs" or worse.

The Chinese aren't selling cars in the US market but you can bet there'd be a lot of prejudice out there in the roads and parking lots of small-town America if they were.

Later, in the 1980s, Japan emerged as a player in computing and data processing, but we all knew that they were culturally ill-adapted to develop good software, so no biggie. Of course, this was just a refrain of 1930s-era prejudices. "They're all nearsighted. No way these guys can fly fighters and bombers." By the 1990s, many young people thought of Japan as the country where the best video games came from, and any notion that they were somehow incapable of writing code was forgotten.

So with respect to China and the US, I think we'll end up as valued trading partners in the long run. It's just a matter of waiting for one irrational prejudice after another to go away. This will take time, but it'll happen... if neither of us does anything stupid.

[chrisco255]

It's okay to prefer American made products without bringing some kinda racial implication into it. The whole "buy local" movement is simply an extension of this. It's okay to prefer to trade with your local economy.

While we've never been at war with China, it's not infeasible given their attitude towards Taiwan. And there's very real trade-offs with convenience of importing everything vs. the resiliency of having your own supply chains which we saw a small taste of in the early days of 2020 with medical supplies.

We already buy many China-made things including iPhones and we don't bat an eye at the "Designed in CA, made in China" label... but there's a lot of us that feel uncomfortable with yielding our manufacturing base to globalism, not least of which is that it puts you in a bind if you need to stand up to said country when they encroach on more ideologically-aligned democracies.

[sudosysgen]

The US has been at war with China in Korea, actually.

[AnthonyMouse]

A principle difference between Japan and China is that the war was followed with the Marshall Plan, which brought Japan a new constitution and elected government. That hasn't happened in China and it isn't obvious that it's about to.