This insightful book explores the intense and ultimately fleeting moment in 1980s America when the future looked Japanese. Would Japan’s remarkable post–World War II economic success enable the East Asian nation to overtake the United States? Or could Japan’s globe-trotting corporations serve as a model for battered U.S. industries, pointing the way to a future of globalized commerce and culture? While popular films and literature recycled old anti-Asian imagery and crafted new ways of imagining the “yellow peril,” and formal U.S.-Japan relations remained locked in a holding pattern of Cold War complacency, a remarkable shift was happening in countless local places throughout the United States: Japanese goods were remaking American consumer life and injecting contemporary globalization into U.S. commerce and culture. What impact did the flood of billions of Japanese things have on the ways Americans produced, consumed, and thought about their place in the world?

From autoworkers to anime fans, Consuming Japan introduces new unorthodox actors into foreign-relations history, demonstrating how the flow of all things Japanese contributed to the globalizing of America in the late twentieth century.

“Consuming Japan is theoretically sophisticated, beautifully written, judicious in its analysis and, best of all, fun to read. Anyone who grew up during the 1980s will have a blast reading this book. I know that I did.”

— Gregg Brazinsky (George Washington University)

Diplomatic History, August 2018

“Consuming Japan is a fine study that inspires larger conversations about Japan, the United States, East Asia, and the wider international community. Through creative research and interdisciplinary analysis, McKevitt makes it clear that we do indeed live in a globalizing world. As the book so eloquently demonstrates, we should not take ‘ordinary’ things—including cars, food, and TV shows—for granted. They can teach us a great deal.”

— Hiroshi Kitamura (College of William and Mary)

H-Diplo, July 2018