Return With Us Now To The Days Of "Japanophobia"

That’s what Ronald Bailey of Reason dubs a virus that gripped America in the late 1980s and early 1990s (and caused several so-so movies to be released as well, including Black Rain and Rising Sun):

Looking back, the most wrong-headed foreign policy phenomenon of the time was Japanophobia. Japanophobia was the unreasoning fear that Japanese companies were about to buy up everything in sight in America. The iconic event that focused the public’s fears on an imminent Japanese buyout of America was Mitsubishi’s purchase of a majority holding in New York City’s Rockefeller Center in 1989.

Bailey demonstrates how easy it was this year for this long-dormant condition to morph into Dubai-aphobia.