What a difference a decade makes. Ten years ago, the United States was widely viewed as an overextended superpower whose moment had come and gone. Japan was the primary challenger to Pax Americana, a nation whose superior manufacturing skills and unique cultural organization would provide the foundation for international supremacy in the 21st century. The two nations' changing fortunes created serious and unseemly friction between two governments that were not only allies, but that considered themselves part of "the most important bilateral relationship in the world, bar none."
In the decade since then, the U.S. has enjoyed unprecedented growth and prosperity while Japan has endured "the lost decade." There may still be a "Japanese threat," but the worry today is of Japanese weakness, not Japanese strength. While the Japan-U.S. relationship has been transformed, there is no indication that the bilateral policy framework has kept pace with those changes. The message of this important new study is that adjustment is overdue: Policy must adapt to these new circumstances. Quite simply, it is time that the U.S. stopped treating Japan differently from other countries. No more bashing, indeed.
Japan's unprecedented economic rise in the 1970s and '80s gave rise to a school of thought known as "revisionism." Its members argued that Japan behaved fundamentally differently from other nations and needed to be treated accordingly. While revisionism never became official U.S. policy, every administration in Washington developed Japan-specific policies (usually in the form of bilateral economic initiatives) to deal with "the Japan problem" -- rising unemployment and rising trade deficits in the U.S. while Japan enjoyed full employment and ever-increasing surpluses.