John Ganz on the Era When America Was Consumed by Panic With Corporate Japan

Odd Lots

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🗓️ 10 October 2025

⏱️ 51 minutes

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Summary

These days, there's a non-stop drumbeat of concern that China and its dominant companies will eat America's economic lunch, so to speak. Of course, this isn't the first time in our history that there were worries about a rising Asian industrial power. In the 1980s and early 1990s, there was a lot of concern about the rise of corporate Japan. And that fear was seen all over movies and pop culture, from Die Hard to the Michael Crichton novel Rising Sun. This time there is one big difference: Chinese dominance doesn't permeate our pop culture in the same way. And furthermore, the US has long had military bases in Japan, so that dimension was quite different, too. To understand this period further, we talk to John Ganz, who writes the Unpopular Front newsletter, and is the author of the recent book, When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s. We discuss how this fear came about and disappeared, but also how it still influences American politics to this day.

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1:05.7	Bloomberg Audio Studios.
1:10.2	Podcasts Radio News.
1:18.6	Hello and welcome to another episode of the Oddlaws podcast. I'm Jill Wisenthal.
1:28.1	And I'm Tracy Alloy. Tracy, here's something I've been thinking about with respect to China and all of the
1:33.0	tensions with China, which is that it feels very elite, as in people in D.C. talk about it. People
1:39.4	in, obviously, in finance and business talk about it. It does not strike me that in the broad, and I could be wrong, my judgment could be off,
1:48.5	but it does not strike me that in the broad public that there are a lot of people,
1:54.4	that it's top of mind for a lot of the public.
1:58.1	Weirdly, I think it was probably more top of mind in the past, right?
2:02.5	And the hollowing out of America's manufacturing sector.
2:06.0	I mean, that argument is kind of what has given rise to a lot of the populist politics that we see nowadays, right?
2:11.6	Yeah, that's true.
2:12.6	Right.
2:12.9	During the China shock, there were a lot of people aware that their factories or the townists that dependent on
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