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The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 16 (2005)

The Political Science Fictionof Challenge to America (PBS, 1993)
Marie THORSTEN *What happened to IBM, the symbol of American supremacy?1—Challenge to America, 1993

Roger and Me, Michael Moore’s 1989 documentary, articulates theoutrage felt by many Americans when companies began replacing workers with robotic technology and cheaper labor overseas.2 This comic
opera-commentary is Moore’s quest to interview Roger Smith, Chief Executive Ofﬁcer of the world’s largest transnational corporation, General
Motors (GM). Seeking accountability from the elusive hierarch for his
assault on the American Dream, Moore demanded to know why Smith
allowed GM to nearly destroy Flint, Michigan (Moore’s hometown),
where GM closed its plant and left 30,000 autoworkers unemployed.
Roger and Me closes with Pat Boone crooning “I am Proud to Be an
American,” and the 1960s beauty queen, country singer and Florida
orange juice spokesperson, Anita Bryant, squeaking, “And if you decideto go for it, you’ll make it.” Through Moore’s lens, these two pious iconsof old-fashioned American values, along with other celebrities who visited Flint, are no different from Roger Smith and other wielders of cultural, economic and political power who shirked their responsibility forthe common worker and the livelihood of the American community.
Shortly following the release of Roger and Me, another documentarian also addressed the shattered lives of disillusioned American workers,
but in the context of the decline of corporate America vis-à-vis foreign
Copyright © 2005 Marie Thorsten. All rights reserved. This work may be used,with this notice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work
may be distributed, electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without
permission from the author.
*Associate Professor, Doshisha University

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competitors. Hedrick Smith’s lesser-known four-and-one-half hour
homily, Challenge to America, broadcast on PBS in 1993 (after over two
years of research and planning), soberly asks, “What happened to IBM,the symbol of American supremacy?”3 America is losing to foreigncompetition, it warns, but “the problem will not be entirely solved byblaming foreigners or CEOs; the problem lies with us.” Challenge to
America becomes Roger’s methodological antithesis, diverting theviewer’s gaze from the summit to the “root”—as far down as the second
grade, where future workers of the nation get started. Whereas Moore
left Americans deliberating over their betrayal by leaders, Challenge to
America picks up where Anita Bryant and Pat Boone left off. It restores
coherence to the American Dream by rallying for the retraining of ordinary Americans, toward the aim of better competitiveness with foreigncountries and by contextual implication, Japan, above all.
Much has changed, as public paranoia over Japan segued to a lovehate fest with globalization and again to the War on Terrorism. In revisiting Challenge to America, however, the intent is not to disprove theJapanese economic takeover that was perceived so realistically. Instead,
it is to recognize the mutability of the idea of reality conveyed in everyday media as the documentary ﬁlm. Cultural critics increasingly recognize documentary ﬁlm as a blurred realm of representations. Ostensibly“facts only,” the documentary ﬁlm presents “situated knowledge,” representations linked to larger, ever-changing socio-historical forces. The
capacity of the documentary gaze to be “constitutively multiform”
should not be underestimated, argues ﬁlm scholar Michael Renov. The
documentary is not bound to the “rigorously enforced reality principle”
assuming that all documentaries are real, nonﬁction; it engages “conscious motives such as intellectual curiosity as well as less conscious
ones aligned with fantasy, memory, or longing.”4The less conscious motives in Challenge to America derived from theperceived decline of American economic supremacy against the rise ofJapan, other Asian countries and Germany in the 1980s. This paper isconcerned with how the ﬁlm’s alien probe—its investigation into theinner workings of Japan and Germany as futuristically superior rivals—
appropriates such emotions as economic nationalism as a buffer against
a new kind of danger.5 Probing Japanese and German children, workers
and beneﬁcent managers as Übermenschen, Challenge to America
romances the border between Us and Them. It asks, what is happening
to America, as it is being overtaken by superior (alien) nations?

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At ﬁrst glance, then, Challenge to America offers a pragmatic solution to Moore’s slap at leaders who really don’t care about ordinary
Americans. With deeper observation, however, it becomes clear that
Hedrick Smith’s “the problem lies with us” is actually an attempt to identify strategic Otherness and re-frame national unity. The science-ﬁctionlike ambience in the documentary series creates the moral space ofinsecurity, and offers economic nationalism and its emphasis on humancapital as the heroic solution. Unlike the ironic humor in Roger and Methat acts as an opening to dialogue and reﬂection, however, Challenge
to America’s economic nationalism seals the connections between corporations and nations; it argues only for the further discipline of patriotic workers rather than the dialogue of informed and inquisitive citizens.
TAKE ME TO . . .
“Take me to your leader” is a guiding cliché of science ﬁction. Aliens
want to ﬁnd out who or what makes the unknown entity tick. But in theimmediate post Cold War moment, when militarism seemed passé andeconomism was newly legitimated, where was the territorial or institutional center of the material nation, and what was its precise unit ofstrength? Challenge to America, like other then-au courant “Paciﬁc Century” theses, imagined the elusive center of capitalist power in metaphor,
the industrious worker. Workers of the post cold war, not just deployedsoldiers and weapons, make the nation strong. Thus obedient and dynamic foreign Superkids and their more attentive parents became themirrored lenses for remolding the American national body toward a new
ideal of happy, familial relations within and among corporations,schools, and families. Challenge did not just mourn the decline ofAmerican economic prestige and seek answers in high places. It aimed
to fully re-invent a new material nation from the crib to the corporation.
Appropriating the familiar, Challenge to America uses panopticalpower by bringing social formations from “from below”—from the ordinary home, classroom and assembly line—into sharp focus, while power“from above”—from corporate managers and heads of state—is obfuscated. Michel Foucault (adapting Bentham) describes panoptical power
as a disciplinary technique in which a guard observes all inhabitants ofa village from a central, elevated point, recording each of their moves toestablish a meticulous catalogue of standards. The person observed locates his or her own identity against such standards, without considering

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the elevated and privileged power controlling the standards and movement. The subject under surveillance, as an object, is “in a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of
power.”6 Subjects “perform” the objectives of biopower, the nexus oflife and politics, as everyday activity; power is internalized in the very
functioning of their bodies.
On the surface, the ﬁlm sings praises to foreign competition as an exercise of national self-ﬂagellation. Germany and Japan are typecast as rolemodels of the future, while America is the proverbial hare that stopped
to rest on the laurels of war victory and 1950s-style happy days.7 Yet its
dichotomizing of Japan as futuristic desire and America as obsolete delusion is consistent with the stereotyping taking place outside the ﬁlm studio in late 1980s America: Japan, Inc., as enemy, America as victim.
As Homi Bhaba expresses it, the idea of the “nation” is imagined in a
split narrative—in one set of ideas that conjoins citizens as co-participants to a timeless national pedagogy, and in another set that stratiﬁes
citizens so that they can carry out each of their special duties to thenation-state in time-speciﬁc acts of performance.8 Challenge to America“writes” the nation in terms of both pedagogy and performance; itteaches people to feel they share a common economic destiny while itmotivates them to perform for that destiny.
As pedagogy, Challenge’s myth evokes nostalgia for the 1950s, when
the statement, “What is good for General Motors is good for the country,
and vice versa,” made perfect sense.9 Assigning sentiment to economic
objects and achievements, the ﬁlm afﬁrms a mythology of America as atimelessly strong economic nation, a “corporate culture.” The imagecontinuum of logos such as IBM, RCA, GM and Boeing, along with currency, workers and productive parents and children, reacts to imminent
loss: the moral of the story in Challenge to America is that downtrodden
America needs to give up its individualistic capitalism, and adopt methods of communal, “teamwork” capitalism practiced by its rivals. The
ﬁlm’s own logo is a circulating global sphere onto which are afﬁxed theDeutsche mark, the dollar, and the yen, along with their respective
national ﬂags. Hedrick Smith also narrates against the backdrop of thethree currencies hoisted alongside their partnered national ﬂags. The starsection of the American Stars and Stripes is tilted to create a triangle atthe center of the ten-dollar bill, a Stars and Dollars pinnacle from which
the camera dramatically zooms back and forth. American students andworkers also appear and disappear from the ﬂag-currency motif.

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ECONOMICS AS NATIONALISMThis mediated coding of national economic symbols against external
threat can be called “economic nationalism,” yet the emotional intensityof the “nation” as a collective people is typically neglected in utterancesof that term.10 American and European scholars, policymakers and journalists have used “economic nationalism,” “mercantilism” and “neomercantilism” interchangeably to depict the political modus operandi ofJapan,11 focusing almost exclusively on the state and its relationship witheconomic institutions. Such trade war chroniclers take seriously the roleof Japan’s “ruling triumvirate”—its bureaucracy, business leaders andleading Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). They insinuate the corruption
inherent in economic nationalism, since industrial leaders “collude” with
political leaders. They imply that economic nationalism serves Japan
more than any industrialized economy in the world, and that economic
nationalism is intrinsic to the state, not politically contingent.
Fusing state-centered economic nationalism with the actual “nation”
proves much more complicated. “Economics” does not form a partnership with “nationalism” as smoothly as ethnicity, nationality, language,
religion and other attributes or mass-produced sentimentalities frequently corralled into the borders of nation-states. Economics engages
motion, an “exchange impulse” that ignores boundaries; nationalism
constructs sentiments of restraint and containment, a “sovereignty impulse” to protect the boundaries of nation-states.12 Contradictions ofaffect can occur when cultural artifacts cross national borders and become exchanged via capital. Some artifacts lose their ability to specify
uniqueness, causing dissonance to the guardians of authenticity, the culture-protectionists who feel displaced when border-crossing Japanesebusinessmen wear cowboy hats, or conversely, when itinerant blondes
speak Japanese. Other artifacts spread their cultural uniqueness acrossborders, encroaching on territories of “others” as manifestations of cultural imperialism: America and Japan, perhaps as no two other nations,share in common the impressions that their products, culture, factories
and corporations are creating “Americanization” or “Japanization” whentransferred across borders.
Economic nationalism’s opposing impulses of containment andexchange often require creative subterfuge.13 Leaders learn to manage
this contradiction not only institutionally, but also rhetorically. Statesacquire great power because of their exports and expansionism; their

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diplomatic relations with one another necessitate utterances of “freetrade” as tatemae, the Japanese concept for the publicly expressible principle which literally means “façade.” Efforts to tame capitalist intrusions
by others and protect one’s own (to the extent they can be “owned”) markets, whether to the beneﬁt of corporations or communities—via state
actions to curb imports, assign quotas, assist certain key industries etc.—
are generally actions that constitute protectionism, mercantilism, neomercantilism and sometimes, economic nationalism. But these are rarelylabels one afﬁxes to one’s own regime: they are ascribed to others. Protectionist measures appeal to local constituencies, such as labor unions
and agricultural workers, but acquire a hue of “cheating” in the international corporate community. Both the United States and Japan wereactively practicing neo-mercantilism during the trade war era (and into
today), ostensibly in reaction to one another, but they kept their own
practices at the level of honne, the Japanese concept for the “real intentions” that cannot be publicly expressed.
For a brief period in the 1980s and into the ﬁrst years of the ﬁrst Clinton
administration (1992–1996), coinciding with the perceived threat fromJapan and other Asian economies, it became gradually okay to mention
the unmentionable: the need to link business and government via a legitimate “industrial policy,” not an illegitimate “ism” (neomercantilism,
economic nationalism). The general mood of the country was shiftingfrom “Bash Japan” to “Learn from Japan”—or at least toward a method
to ease anxiety about the Japanese threat in a publicly acceptable manner. Part of this drift to join ‘em if you can’t beat ‘em was to develop
more structural congruence with Japan. The leading academic promoting industrial policy was Chalmers Johnson, who outlined its main components as investment in infrastructure and public (“federal”) measures
to increase personal savings, and promote education and entry into hightech and other jobs valuable to national growth.14 Education, work andhousehold economics—the subjects of Challenge to America—thus ﬁgure prominently, and are the least likely categories of industrial policy
to be castigated as “trade barriers.”
Early in his ﬁrst presidential campaign, former U.S. President Bill
Clinton gained bipartisan popularity for his ability to straddle both the“free market and democracy” rhetoric of his Republican rival, incumbent George H. W. Bush, and the inklings of protectionist rhetoricamong his own Democratic contenders. Clinton’s support for the North
American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) (during the campaign) was

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sprinkled with hesitations, e.g., “While we don’t know what will happen
to these other regional trading blocs we know enough to know that weneed stronger ties to our neighbors, both for the positive opportunity andto protect us in the event that other countries become more protectionist.”15 He appeased the left wing of the party (who opposed NAFTA) by“peace dividend” appeals to transfer gains from military downsizing todomestic issues such as education and worker training programs. While
his fellow Democrats were more forthright in advocating Japanese-styleindustrial policy, Clinton spoke only of a “comprehensive national strategy” to support economic growth.16 State intervention—i.e., Big Government—was implied, a notion repellent to many Americans, but the“federal” aspect was groomed into a more patriotically appealing“national.” Indeed, plans for Clinton’s ﬁrst cabinet in 1992 included thecreation of an Economic Security Council to respond to the neomercantilist Ministry of Trade and Industry in Japan; what he ended up creating to merge domestic economics with foreign policy was the National
Economic Council (NEC), whose staff reported to heads of both the NEC
and the National Security Council.17
There is thus the economic nationalism of Japan enunciated throughAmerican and European texts, more accurately an economic statism, andthe contrasting economic nationalism qua nationalism attributed toAmericans (though called “patriotism” if mentioned at all). The sheer
pedagogically sentimental content of economic nationalism—from the“nation”—rendered through the typical signposts of ﬂags, slogans andmilitary language, was pervasive, nonpartisan and legitimate in America
throughout the period of the Japan threat.
Yet the intimations of support for industrial policy and counter-Japan
protectionism that gradually became audible in America during theimmediate post-Cold War period faded in the early years of the Clinton
administration. In general, American leaders began to promote theUnited States as “not Japan”: Japan practices economic nationalism;
America practices free trade. (The supreme irony here is that the “free”
in “free trade” is the same etymological symbol rendered as “liberal”—
as in Adam Smith’s “liberal”—in Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party, considered by American leaders as the bastion of economic nationalism.)
Because Americans associate institutional restraints on capitalism, i.e.,“trade barriers,” with authoritarianism, and likewise, free trade withdemocracy, there is considerable inhibition to recognize, and hence,
make ofﬁcial, actions that could be called economic nationalism.

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MARIE THORSTEN“Democracy and freedom” are constitutionally enshrined and legitimate;economic nationalism is tucked away so as not to expose its contradictions.
In the American case, therefore, while the “nation” of economic nationalism really mattered, “nation” also became a subterfuge to ignore
the contradictions and collusions of capitalism and nationalism at thelevel of the state. In the Japanese case (again, rendered through the outside gaze), the nation was conceptually bypassed so that nation, state andcorporation—Japan, Inc.—were indeed one. At one level, Japanese people were rendered as docile, single-minded homo economicus—or, the“economic animal,” the exact personiﬁcations of Japan, Inc. With aslight permutation however, the homo economicus became the rolemodel of the future world of transnational capital and technology.
Whether reviled or romanced, however, the human aftershocks experienced in high-speed economics were seldom considered by trade war
enthusiasts.
This is why closing the tension between the ﬂuidity of the economic“exchange impulse” and of any constraining “sovereignty impulse”—
whether of localities, nation-states, or regions—is depoliticizing. As longas capitalism affects everyone globally, it is inevitable that any publicsphere will need to debate and negotiate the difﬁcult problems of maintaining social stability and equity when practices of capitalism deﬁne
new markets, displace workers and alter communities.18 In Roger and
Me, Michael Moore suspends himself in the ironic space between
community and corporatism by calling on leaders to take notice of thehardships experienced by residents of Flint, Michigan when they areabandoned by General Motors. Moore’s tragicomic method politicizes(in the sense of opening to democratic dialogue) the effects on the community.
The documentary techniques of Challenge to America, in contrast,
depoliticize (in the sense of hiding) the tension between economism andthe sovereignty impulse. First, in Bhaba’s sense of “pedagogy,” the socalled “corporate culture” of America as another manifestation of thetimeless idea of the imagined “nation” is reiﬁed; second, in Bhaba’s
sense of “performance,” the inherent tension between economism andnationalism is shifted onto schools, homes and workplaces. The transferof power from “above” to “below” is also one from “politics” to “police,”
to borrow concepts from Jacques Rancière. Politics, which is essentiallydemocracy itself, emerges from paradox, spaces where dilemmas must

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be negotiated because they have no uniformly agreed-upon proper place.
“Police” in his usage, depicts the gravitation toward social ordering thatis so uniform and consensual that the need for politics is obviated.19
Panoptical power brings about the closed “police”-like ordering of society depicted by Rancière, since, as power from above becomes less visible, and as individuals become preoccupied in household economic
pursuits (“my-home-ism” in Japanese), the more the very symbolic representation of the “nation” diminishes liminally. Consumers, students
and workers do not need to see how their purchases, test scores and laborcompare with other nation-state rivals in order to be good economic subjects. They have internalized the disciplinary norms of society—asbiopower.20
Third, the very ambience of Challenge to America paciﬁes anxiety byengaging viewers in simplistic narrative expectations, as one would ﬁnd
in Us vs. Them science ﬁction stories that fail to inspire deeper reﬂection. In the following section I discuss the ﬁlm’s narrative closure of thespace between economism and nationalism.
TAKE ME TO OUR LEADERS“Why were our best companies in trouble?” queries Smith, explaining the impetus for the series that will take viewers into the “classrooms,
factories and homes” of the three great nations to seek out the “roots” ofAmerica’s problems. Part I, “Old Ways, New Game,” reviews the misfortunes of American corporations, evoking nostalgia for the iconic
reminders of the American Dream. It begins with the story of IBM, thevery metaphor of America itself that seemed “impregnable” for half acentury. Former employees decry IBM’s “bureaucratic claw,” the arrogance and lack of foresight in the top leadership of IBM as well as other
American corporations. Such corporations that refuse to cast off old
ways will be forced to “change or die,” reports Smith. They must recognize that “jobs spring from ideas,” yet “ideas alone are not enough ifthey are not commercialized.” “We” Americans invented such things as
the video camera and liquid crystal, yet because of American managerial myopia, the Japanese were able to fully develop these ideas into entrepreneurial successes while Americans sat idle.
Smith then directs our attention to an American computer trade show
where Asian engineers are earnestly studying and sketching diagrams ofan intriguing new IBM telephone. To embellish this potent scene,

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insights from an expert witness are summoned. Economist Lester
Thurow laments, “The problem is, the rest of the world sees you inventa new product, they copy it very fast, and microseconds later they’rebuilding it. And if you’re not the cheapest builder of that product then it
doesn’t do you any good. And of course the best example is the video
camera and video recorder, which were invented in America but produced in Japan. That’s where all the income is. That’s where all the jobs
are. That’s where all the management is.” Cut back to Smith, who interviews the Asians at the trade fair, who happen to be Koreans: “How long
will it take you to copy this?” “Not copy,” retorts one of them. Through“independent development” they will “maybe” develop it within two
years, viewers learn.
“Our industrial leaders were cocky and careless,” Smith reﬂects, as
excerpts of 1950s commercials evoke nostalgia for the triumphant timesof big cars and easy living, when Japan and Germany were still recovering from the war. Suddenly the time warp fades; that was “then” andthis is “now,” the narrator continues, awakening viewers to the gloomy
scene of a Kansas GM plant that closed its doors in 1988. A lachrymose
female autoworker, laid off after 12 years of dedicated service, shares
her loss of pride with Smith and viewers. Challenge very brieﬂy retraces
Roger and Me’s trek, chastising GM for its insensitive and anti-humanistic era of “re-industrializing,” when it replaced workers with robotics
in a high-tech “buying spree.” Again, the alien threat: the management
believed they were following the leading techniques from Toyota andHonda, remarks Harry J. Pearce, GM’s Vice President and Executive
Counsel, but they also failed to take into consideration the leaner management style and workers’ teamwork that were also coordinated withrobotics in Japan.
Thus, Challenge to America re-dreams America into a “new game.”
As Part I closes, Smith turns Them into Us, extracting a new performance of workers, a new wealth of the nation, a new embrace of productivity-grinding “family values” in home, school and work. GM’s
Pearce reiterates that “the challenge is absolutely immense. And I canassure you we’re running a little faster than Honda and Toyota. Because
we’re behind ’em and we gotta catch ’em. I just hope they don’t lookover their shoulder.” Hedrick Smith then goes to UAW local president
L.D. Edwards for a similar perspective, that the competition is against
Them [the foreign competition], not within Us [Americans]: “We cancertainly strike General Motors and take them under. And they can strike

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us and take us under. But no one wins but the foreign competition.”
Edwards continues, establishing the link into Part Two, “If we don’t
build the best quality, give the American customer the best product, thenwe can’t survive.”“Edwards’ point is telling,” Smith moralizes. “The stakes are high for
all of us and we won’t make it until we start working together. The
corporate giants are battling furiously to get back into the game, and venture capitalists are hoping to leapfrog the Japanese with new technologies.” After his two years of traveling and research, Smith advises that
America’s arrogance and rigidity will not help restore competitiveness.
Viewers must learn that if the American Dream is to be reshaped,
motivation must come from the bottom up. The new economic reawakening will be inspired by viewing the futuristic intelligence and skills of
Others, and will result in the absorption of national economic motives
in American schools, homes and workplaces. Accordingly, Americans
must learn that “People are the key to success.”
TAKE ME TO OUR FAMILIES“Over the past twenty years, we’ve watched millions of good
American jobs move abroad,” Smith reminds us, effectively removing
the agency of who did the moving. “Japanese, Germans, and others haveovertaken our industry by working smarter and more efﬁciently than wedo, and by effective teamwork. Often we’ve blamed foreigners for our
problems, but the answers lie at our own doorstop. To get ahead of thechanging game of global competition, we need a high performance workforce—higher skills and more teamwork than ever before. School iswhere the race begins, the heart of the nation, where we teach our children the skills they will need and pass along our bedrock values.”
The gaze on the powerful, well-manicured men in penthouse ofﬁces
then begins its rapid descent into primary schools. Part Two, titled, “TheHeart of the Nation,” takes viewers into classrooms of Germany andJapan, where the nation-state’s familial metaphor now surfaces. Entering
the selected classrooms and homes of the powerful economic nationtroika, we are soon overwhelmed by the cute songs and recitations of
uniformly-frocked, exuberantly co-operative Japanese second-graders.
We accompany them through their rituals of decorating the classrooms
with ﬂowers, removing their shoes at the door, and serving lunch andcleaning the ﬂoors all by themselves. The school, we learn from Japanese6-Marie Thorsten(p135)6/20 05.7.12 6:46 PM ページ 146

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education expert Thomas Rohlen, is their home away from home; it isfamily. Children learn to manage themselves in groups with the teacher
at the side. American schools, in contrast, emphasize the individual.
American teachers hover over their classrooms, taking great care to callon each individual student, and to display students’ individual artwork,
birthdays and high-performance homework. While the ﬁlm rhetoricallyargues against the continued importance of the “individual” in America
as free agent, it simultaneously objectiﬁes individuals in terms of theirproductive worth to national corporate cultures; the second-grader andthe state are one.
The ﬁlm’s technique of observing the all-important benchmark standards of Japanese and German schoolchildren and workers thus exempliﬁes panoptical power. The elevated point at which Hedrick Smith
narrates, the vantage point of American national power judged bycorporate performance, gradually dims while the happy, unassumingchildren dominate the screen as unwitting avatars of national power.
“People are the key to success,” repeats Smith, implying that Japaneseand German versions of communal capitalism have allowed for bettercare of their respective school and work families than America’s individualist capitalism. To exchange the old pedagogy of individualism for
new performance standards of future workers, Smith may be strained not
to say in precise terms that the United States should mimic the alienSuperpowers, but for all his repetitions of familial and group metaphors,
he may as well. What he does articulate is the need for America to create more trustful (no longer considered collusive) relations between business and government, which should no longer be considered thearchetypal enemies in the new corporate culture. Such industrial policy
would in turn enable better coordination among schools, homes andindustry as well, all to fulﬁll the end purpose of a healthier, more prosperous, more productive nation.
The family unit itself is also scrutinized to see how Japanese andAmericans compare, especially in reference to educational values. Whenescorted to a Japanese Heartland home in Toyota City, Smith introduces
us to an ordinary working class father dressed in a business suit. This
dedicated head of family speaks intelligently about the importance of
education while his similarly well-dressed wife tutors their children in
the background. The Japanese father says he want his kids to acquire
good study habits as well as a “sociable nature.”
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family, two pudgy parents confess they don’t go to PTA because
Wednesday is their bowling night. The mother giggles and prepares
lunch while the hirsute, ﬂannel-shirted father twangs out his eloquentview on American individualism, “It’s the American way, it’s here tostay and there ain’t no way they’re ever gonna git rid of that. That’s whatmade this country great in the ﬁrst place and it will always be that way.”
Another featured Midwesterner, a twelfth grader named Jason, will
never amount to much since he spends all his time working at a fast foodrestaurant to support his car. Unlike Japan and Germany’s efﬁcient vocational guidance, no structure exists in American schools to guide Jason.
He tells each overworked guidance counselor a different story about
what he wants to do with his life, and they think his string of part-timejobs will help him develop a work ethic. “But do you think Jason cancompete with German and Japanese 18-year olds?” Smith asks one
teacher. “That may be the toughest question you’ve asked me yet,” theteacher responds. (Here, Smith’s rhetoric contrasts with that of Moore,
whose well-known populist signature is to impart credibility and respectability onto the Joe Six-pack assembly-line workers from Flint who
have no idea what a latte is.)Challenge to America’s cherubic economic nationalism echoes othertripolar political education-economical theses. Ray Marshall and Marc
Tucker, in Thinking for a Living: Education and the Wealth of Nations(1992),21 for example, call the Japan-German system “social partner capitalism” toward which Americans must invent a comparable “humanresource capitalism” where citizens “think for a living.” Ofﬁcially theyargue for “less bureaucracy, more accountability,” while at the same time
advocating an elaborate new code of educational standards, including
national exams for both students and teachers.22 These points are also
advocated in Part IV of the ﬁlm. The power from above authorizing thecontinuous benchmarking becomes naturalized, unremarkable. The
reconﬁrmation of the worker-student-economic nation is designed toease the anxiety that would be brought about by the loss of individualism, assuming that America would adopt some sort of Japan or Germanystyled industrial policy.
Another tripolar thesis is Lester Thurow’s Head to Head: The Coming
Battle Among Japan, Europe, and America (1992)23 (Although “Europe”
ﬁgures in Thurow’s title, his focus is clearly on Germany. As he states,
explaining the shift from bipolar military rivalry to tripolar economic
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MARIE THORSTENJapan, the European Community, centered around its most powerfulcountry, Germany; and the United States.”24) Thurow ﬁgures prominently in Challenge to America, and Hedrick Smith’s story likewise follows the letter and spirit of Head to Head quite closely. Both works start
off with the transition of global power from military to economic following the collapse of Communism, and they both decry the decline ofcorporations as symbols of American power. They then turn to speciﬁc
ideas for reconstructing the American Dream based on the competitive“new rules” of Japan’s “Japan, Inc.” and Germany’s “Das Volk” teamwork-extolling communitarian industrial policies. The “new rules” of
the game may seem antithetical to free market Americans, they agree,
but the new rules reﬂect the new international playing ﬁeld. Thurow
argues further that teamwork is indeed part of the American landscape;the problem is that individuals no longer recognize it as such:
Teams were important in America’s history—wagon trains conquered theWest, men working together on the assembly line in American industry conquered the world, a successful national strategy and a lot of teamwork put an
American on the moon ﬁrst (and thus far, last). But the American mythology extols only the individual—the Lone Ranger or Rambo. In America, hallsof fame exist for almost every conceivable activity, but nowhere do
Americans raise monuments in praise of teamwork. Only national mythology stands between Americans and the construction of successful economic
teams.25

Both Smith and Thurow thus tout the “new rules,” but their analyses
might instead be dubbed, “New Ways, Old Game.” Curiously, they bothseem to shy away from the temptation to remind Americans that military success also needed the paternalism of government and sacriﬁce ofindividuals through teamwork. (No monuments in praise of teamwork?
Has Thurow never seen the Iwo Jima monument?) But rather than anticipate the breakdown of borders that would result from the new power
shift to global capitalism, both nostalgically recapture the cold war conceit of a world mapped into disparate nation-states. The atavistic tripolarization of Japan, Germany and the United States jointly resembles
both World War II and the bipolar cold war scenario. Not surprisingly,
Thurow’s Head to Head revels in competitive, mostly war metaphors
exempliﬁed in the subtitle, The Coming War—and ad nauseum references to winning and losing. Yet bookstores overﬂowed with clones ofHead to Head during this era, and many were far more “militarized” intheir attempts to remind Americans of the treachery of Japan in the
Paciﬁc War.

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Smith’s military imagery is more subtle than Thurow’s, but nonetheless provocative. In Part I, when we learn how the Japanese companies
became fascinated with America’s RCA-led invention of liquid crystal,
the recording of Japan’s public announcement of the invention is mufﬂed, with a minor-key military tune in the background: economic competition thus feels like a World War II newsreel. One commentator ends
Part III (which concerns government-business relations) with the declaration, “We did it in once in war [raise our national conﬁdence], we cando it again.”
Inspiring citizens to productivity also diverted attention from the story’s notable absences. Perhaps the most remarkable absence in the ﬁlm
is its failure to mention the negotiation of NATFA which took place concurrently with the making of the ﬁlm, from 1991 to 1993. Because bothof America’s leading political parties (Republicans and the Clinton faction of Democrats) endorsed the agreement, mainstream public opinion
gradually gave into the persuasion that “NAFTA will create jobs”/ “Wehafta NAFTA”—ergo, it then became okay to send factories to Mexico;“free-trade” became the patriotic euphemism for neoliberal global expansionism. Meanwhile, the strong nationalist sentimentality expressedin Challenge to America became less and less popular until it ﬁzzled into
the Patrick Buchanan fringe (and was only barely alive in the 2004 antioutsourcing arguments of the Kerry-Edwards campaign, ﬁlled with qualiﬁcations on the inevitability of globalization). In the 1990s, some tried
to let China ﬁll the void of economic enemy, but anti-Chinese economic nationalism, in the context of accepted globalization, never gripped
the American nation in the same way as anti-Japanese economic nationalism, which resurrected World War II imagery and neatly ﬁlled the gapof enemy replacement in the meltdown of the Cold War.26 Populist
watchdogs of corporate responsibility such as Michael Moore, meanwhile, took their arguments to the global level.
Another absent story is the popular-level economic nationalism, theimpetus to “Buy American.” Before “Learn from Japan,” individuals
practiced patriotism with their pocketbooks, boycotting Japanese andother foreign-made goods. This quintessential populist economic nationalism was considerably more conspicuous, unsavory and more apparently contradictory than Learn from Japan’s objective of transforming
education and worker training. Dana Frank, who has chronicled thewaves of “Buy American” movements since the founding of the nation,
reveals that the drama of economic competition in the 1970s and 1980s
produced the “longest, and deepest wave of Buy American sentiment in

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U.S. history.”27 Americans felt righteous in demonstrating and legitimating the worth of American products. Yet the nation-wide consciousness to buy only American products turned ugly because it so often
resurrected and coincided with racist sentiment against Japanese, and by
association, all Asians. One of the labor unions promulgating Buy
American sentiment, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union(ILGWU), put a poster of the American ﬂag in the New York subway
system in 1972. Under the ﬂag was the caption: “MADE IN JAPAN:
Has your job been exported to Japan? . . . If not, it soon will be unless
you buy the products of American workers who buy from you.” Numerous editorials, community groups and organizations supporting Asian
Americans around the nation condemned the poster as a possible fusionof apparel and the Yellow Peril.28
Once opened, the box of World War II symbols was difﬁcult to close,
since it resonated across several layers of public sentiment. In the 1980s,
two incidents in particular marked the extent to which the public was
willing to blame its economic nationalist frustrations on Japan. At a picnic for the United Auto Workers (UAW) Union, members took turns
smashing a Toyota with a sledgehammer, fully reveling in the mass publicity. And in 1982, the ugliest incident to mark the era of blaming
America’s economic woes on Japan occurred when two laid-off GM
workers in Detroit battered an Asian American to death, blaming him
for the loss of their jobs. The victim turned out to be an American ofChinese ancestry named Vincent Chin.
Despite the public outcry against these incidents, much of the catharsis went unchecked. The UAW bumper sticker politics included several
themes and variations on the especially enduring slogan, “BUY AMERICAN: THE JOB YOU SAVE MAY BE YOUR OWN.” The UAW’s
parking lot in Detroit featured the sign, “UAW PARKING RESERVEDFOR U.S. AND CANADIAN VEHICLES ONLY. PLEASE PARKIMPORTS ELSEWHERE.” A GM worker set ﬁre to a Japanese ﬂag in
a New Jersey plant while blaring Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in theUSA.”29
Pearl Harbor ﬁgured prominently in the imagery of Buy American. A
Florida entrepreneur churning out anti-Japanese products to sell at union
conventions produced a best-selling T-shirt featuring a Japanese ﬁghter
plane dropping electronic parts and automobiles on the U.S., with thecaption, “Pearl Harbor II.” In 1991, a GM plant in Michigan produced apamphlet with the following message, directing its anger at GM’s deci-

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sion to close 21 plants toward Japan, on the 50th commemoration of Pearl
Harbor:A call to arms for all Americans to declare war on Japanese products and all
non American made products! When Japan bombed Pearl Harbor—we went
to war!. . . . And when Japan threatens the security of American jobs we must
go to war again—with a complete boycott of all products not made in
America!30“Buy American” as pocketbook patriotism speciﬁcally targeted Japanese
products and revealed the easy slide between economic nationalism andracist xenophobia. Much of the wave of populist political economy that
also became popular during this era tried to create “afﬁrmative action”—
as does Challenge to America—on the global economic power trinity:
the United States, Japan and Germany. But neither the inclusion ofGermany as a racially similar rival, nor the transition from “hate Japan”
to “love Japan” fully eradicated the racist hue behind America’s antiJapan/love-Japan economic nationalism. (Moore’s inclusion of the xenophobia effect is minimal in Roger and Me, conﬁned to brief shots ofanti-Japan neon signs and grafﬁti.)
CHALLENGE TO AMERICA AS POLITICAL SCIENCE FICTION
Challenge to America’s borrowed motifs from actual science ﬁction
appear then, as a kinder, gentler xenophobia. In Part III, “The Culture ofCommerce,” the gaze returns to the corporate level, both to commend
America for ousting some of its CEOs (including Roger Smith and his
hand-picked successor), and to signal that a new mode of co-operative
relations between business and government, exempliﬁed by keiretsu inJapan and codetermination in Germany, represents the future. In the
opening scene, viewers witness a welcome ceremony for new employees at the Toyota Motor Corporation that (in Smith’s interpretation) takes
place against the dramatic theme song to 2001: A Space Odyssey(Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra). Lights shine brightly
across the many rows of gender-segregated, soon-to-be productive andhappy workers who represent the future of global capitalism. They areabout to enter into a “marriage ceremony” with their company for mutual commitment to lifetime service. Several shots pensively gaze up to
the towering corporate sky-scape, pondering the elusive powers of corporations in a manner reminiscent of cyberpunk or animé. Throughout

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the ﬁlm, then-futuristic images of computers and robotic technology arealso generously showcased.
The most conspicuous feature of Challenge to America is its arrestingof Germany and Japan into unambiguous categories: everything THEY
do is futuristic and efﬁcient, what WE do is old and outdated. Otherness
is radically delineated and antiseptically probed rather than inter-culturally and critically engaged. The competitor is alien-ated, dissected andbiopsied only for the purposes of appropriating ﬁndings into an emboldened, future-oriented national identity for Americans. But is this apparent paradigm shift advocated by the panels of experts really new or old?
Over ﬁfty years before the making of Challenge to America,
America’s genre of World War II propaganda ﬁlms depicted the subhuman nature of the enemy.31 As Renov pithily summarizes Japan’s andAmerica’s mutually mediated otherness: “The Japanese were diminutive, childlike in temperament, simian in appearance (scientiﬁc proof of
their debased evolutionary station) and never to be trusted; theAmericans were overgrown and devilish, ill-smelling and licentious.”32
Challenge to America’s superhumanizing of the enemy is not entirely
analogous to war propaganda’s subhumanizing; we can imagine that
Hedrick Smith gained access to many of the Japanese he interviewed bywining and dining or at least gift-exchanging with them—acts that would
not be possible in war. Nevertheless, depicting the Japanese as superhuman/futuristic/robotic conveys to viewers a sign system similar to thatof subhuman/primitive/bestial in that either stereotype effectively dehumanizes the enemy. The radical distinction of otherness serves both
political ends and deep psychological needs; it is a universal device forcoping with anxiety caused by “our [human] inability to control theworld,” as Sander L. Gilman elucidates.33
Indeed, after the Second World War, understanding the rising importance of global economic power in general, and the enigmatic Japanesesuperpower in particular, was beyond the realm of mathematical bodycount, win-or-lose comprehension to average Americans. Individuals
needed reassurance of what they could personally do to contribute toAmerica’s economic competitiveness. Challenge to America gave themfacile, if self-ﬂagellating, interpretations of the perceived American economic decline, and at the same time it imparted Anita Bryant’s “can do”
feeling that changes could be made. Moreover, it detracted from the evensimpler Blame Japan and Buy America courses of thought and action.
And while the ﬁlm appears to contend that Americans must change

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while the Japanese and Germans hold on to their own established patterns of communal capitalism, this notion, too, was actually a stereotyped pattern of suggestion that only “we” can change and evolve while“they” are ﬁxed, immutable, invulnerable. This arresting of the other
does not just reﬂect America’s anxiety; it relieves it, since by holding
the image stable, the ﬁlm enables the American-deﬁned gaze to gain theupper hand, to control.34 Viewers of Challenge to America learn onlythat the Japanese are happy in their Collective: their idyllic school, home,or company. In Part III, Smith visits a Japanese company worker whose
dormitory pillow reads, “I am happy,” and who tells us how happy he is
to join the corporation where he will work for life and meet his wife as
well. Exceptions on their part do not ﬁt the imaginary. We do not learn
that the wife will have to quit her job once married, or that she never hada chance for lifetime employment to begin with, or that the happy worker might also get laid off or burnt out by long hours and excessive stress.
A host of things become unimaginable in Challenge to America, which
only aims to fortify the American Corporation-as-Nation Dream, and not
really probe the complexities and dangers of Japan’s and Germany’s
rapidly mobilized national materialism to humans.
Finally, the morphing from “hate Japan” as evil enemy to “Learn fromJapan” as the futuristically techno-savvy superpower rival should not be
confused with any sort of saccharine cross-cultural understanding; nordoes it necessarily represent an American humbled posturing. As Renov
reminds us, “[P]aradigm shifts in our mental representations of the world
can and do occur. We can move from fearing to glorifying the Other. We
can move from loving to hating. The most negative stereotype always
has an overtly positive counterweight. As any image is shifted, all stereotypes shift. Thus stereotypes are inherently protean rather than rigid.”35
Projecting Japan into the imagining of the future hardly began with
Challenge to America; so-called Techno-Orientalism has pervaded popular culture, most famously in novels such as Michael Crichton’s RisingSun, and in ﬁlms such as Blade Runner and its many clones attracted toJapan’s high-tech-over-killed and sign-drenched cityscape. Japan is thetechnological dream/nightmare of the future in terms of both desire anddread; but at the same time it is an “Orientalist” image, following Edward
Said’s thesis, in that just as the “West” created the Orient to fasten its
own identity and enable its ideological control, guardians of nation-state
imaginaries also invented the radically deﬁned future represented inimages of Japan.36

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Yet the imagined timelessness of the linking of economism to nationalism proved to be the most timed. Challenge to America was a late-hour(thus, time-speciﬁc) attempt to rekindle emotions around corporate symbolism within the security of stable nation-states. Remarkably, a great
deal of the ﬁlm’s temperament became obsolete even as it was being
produced. When it was ﬁnally shown on public television in 1993, theJapanese economy had already fallen into recession; America had
become the world’s only superpower; software design rather than assembly line automobile production had become the human resource gold
standard, and joint-venture capitalism and the launching of NAFTA had
rapidly given legitimacy to the multinational corporation to transcendborders and lose much of its patriotic moorings in the American collective sentiment. Though lauded throughout the ﬁlm, lifetime employment
and cozy long-term relations between management and labor became
increasingly difﬁcult goals to achieve, even in Japan.
Then, in Challenge’s coda, Hedrick Smith interviews President Bill
Clinton, who instructs on the need to continuously re-educate Americans
who “will likely change jobs seven times in a lifetime.” Not only were
nations, corporations and populations no longer aligned so neatly together as some imagined. Developed states and their leaders began to place
responsibility directly on the worker for changing jobs and retraining.
Likewise leaders emphasized the freedom of the consumer to purchasecheap goods, the goods produced in other countries with cheap labor.
By the mid-1990s and into the present, though economic nationalism isstill alive in various guises, global critics more frequently point to suchso-called neo-liberalism—whereby states advocate for the most profitable, rather than patriotic, practices of corporations.
For the world’s view of Japan, 1995 may have been the annus horribilis that punctuated the end of the miracle—and the threat. Though
Japan’s economy was declining for some time, the failure of the government to respond adequately to the Great Kobe Earthquake in January
1995, and to anticipate the subway gassings by the bizarre Aum
Shinrikyo cult in March of that year, signaled the international community, especially the United States, that Japan was no longer the perfectmodel of bureaucratic efﬁciency; nor was it the evil predator. Meanwhile
greater awareness of the “global,” through NAFTA and the rise ofregional trading blocs, the development of joint venture capitalism, thespread of the Internet, the sporadic reappearance of new areas of conﬂict
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factors well-known by now—gave new complexities to ways many
Americans imagined themselves in relation to others.
A telling point is that by the mid-1990s, with greater awareness ofinternational political economy, a new generation of American consumers began to practice “Buy American” for reasons quite different
than during the anti-Japanese period. Now the motivation was not toprotect American workers and the American economy, but to boycott
American corporations failing to monitor the exploitation of their laborers overseas.
CONCLUSION
Against the many threats to cultural coherence that converged in theearly 1990s—competition with Japan, the rise of information capitalism,
the loss of the strategically stable enemy of the USSR, and globalization’s “race to the bottom”—Challenge to America advocated a “newsocial compact” to join corporations, families and schools toward the“performative” imperative of uniﬁed, orderly competitiveness. Simultaneously, it mediated a “pedagogical” symbolism to redeﬁne danger
from Japan, Germany and others as imminent economic conquest. The
narrative, however, actually tells little about those countries—yet muchabout America.
The attempt to elevate corporate symbols to the level of the ﬂag ﬁzzled into ambivalent postures toward globalization, and then the topic ofeconomic globalization—for citizens whose main form of informationis American mainstream media, anyway—began to attract less and lessmedia attention as the War on Terrorism consumed the interest of theworld. Yet individuals, whether as citizens, workers, students or consumers, are entrenched not just in the entities Hedrick Smith called “corporate cultures” but in the increasingly borderless networks of capital.
As if to legitimate this transfer, Robert Reich (Secretary of Labor in theﬁrst Clinton administration), advocated a re-naming of “economic
nationalism” to no longer indicate a nation’s attachment to corporate
brands, but instead a nation’s attention to work and training:37
Well-trained workers and modern infrastructure attract global webs of enterprise, which invest and give workers relatively good jobs; these jobs in turn,generate additional on-the-job training and experience, thus creating a
powerful lure to other global webs. As skills increase and experience accumulates, a nation’s citizens add greater and greater value to the world

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economy—commanding ever-higher compensation and improving theirstandard of living.

In the above passage, Reich imagined power as emanating from the original agency of “well-trained workers,” then through “global webs” insuch a way to beneﬁt the nation, and then ﬁnally to the world economy:
the ordering and individuation of human bodies are stabilized. Yet theview of the larger center of global economic power is destabilized: is the
Nation-State, Inc. really giving authority to the development of humanresources or are workers increasingly on their own? Are the leaders
directing the movement, activities and loyalties of individuals in corporations, states, nations or other containers? Even where a coherent, territorialized entity managing power cannot be centralized, located or
articulated, however, it continues to be re-imagined and remobilized.
Power often becomes perceptible through the very ﬁctionalizing of Self
and Others in documentaries and other media.
NOTES
1

See note 26.
Roger and Me, produced and directed by Michael Moore, 91 min., Warner Home
Video, 1994 (original 1989), videocassette.
3
Challenge to America, produced and directed by Hedrick Smith, Public Broadcasting Corporation (U.S.), 270 min., 1993. See also note 26 regarding the fate of IBM.
Challenge to America, also produced in a book and audiotape format, was marketed by
Hedrick Smith Productions not only as a PBS documentary ﬁlm but also as a worker
training ﬁlm in corporations.
4
See Michael Renov, “Documentary Horizons: An Afterword,” in Jane M. Gaines
and Michael Renov, eds., Collecting Visible Evidence (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1999), pp. 321–323.
5
Regarding the relationship between danger, identity and the construction of national insecurity, see David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and
the Politics of Identity, rev. ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), andJutta Weldes et. al. eds., Cultures of Insecurity: States, Communities and the Productionof Danger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999),
6
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan
Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), p. 201.
7
It is rumored that policy analysts began to include Germany and the European
Community in their frequent discussions of economic competitiveness to avoid chargesof racism, i.e., to avoid making comparisons only of Japan, and only of Asia, as foreign
Other. This paper concentrates on the Japanese comparison since it was more oftenemphasized in American discussions of political economy.
8
Homi Bhaba, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern
Nation,” in Homi Bhaba, ed., Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 297.
9
The famous statement, often evoking skepticism about the relations between business and government in the United States, is attributed to by Charles E. Wilson, a for2

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mer president of the General Motors Corporation, who later became Secretary of
Defense. See E.D. Hirsch, Jr., Joseph F. Kett, and James Treﬁl, eds., The New Dictionaryof Cultural Literacy, 3rd. ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifﬂin, 2002).
10
See also George T. Crane, “Economic Nationalism: Bringing the Nation Back In,”
Millennium: Journal of International Studies 27, no. 1 (1998), pp. 55–75.
11See; Chalmers Johnson, Japan: Who Governs? The Rise of the Developmental State(New York: W.W. Norton, 1995); Kenneth Pyle, The Japanese Question: Power andPurpose in a New Era, 2nd ed. (Washington: AEI Press, 1996); Malcolm Trevor, JapanRestless Competitor: The Pursuit of Economic Nationalism (RoutledgeCurzon, 2001).
12
This conceptualization borrows from various sources of Michael J. Shapiro, including Cinematic Political Thought: Narrating Race, Nation and Gender (New York
University Press, 1999), p. 46; here he also adapts from Roxanne Doty’s reading of Homi
Bhaba (see next endnote) in Roxanne Doty, “The Double Writing of Statecraft:
Exploring State Responses to Illegal Immigration,” Alternatives 21 (1996), p. 14. See
also Michael J. Shapiro, “Sovereignty and Exchange in the Orders of Modernity,” inGeorge T. Crane, and Abla Amawi, eds., The Theoretical Evolution of International
Political Economy: A Reader, Second Edition (Oxford University Press, 1997).
13
My ﬁrst experience with the need to creatively resolve the tension between economics and nationalism occurred as a teenage worker in one of the dozens of souvenir
shops at the base of America’s unique monument, the granite carving of four 60-ft headsof presidents, Mt. Rushmore. My job was to afﬁx price tags on Mt. Rushmore trinkets
in such a way as to cover the insignia, “Made in Japan.” The towering all-American
granite icon, when peddled into mass-produced bric-a-brac, still needed a subterfuge toconceal patriotism’s opposing impulse: the “race to the bottom” to ﬁnd the lowestpayable workers to make the little metaphors of patriotism.
14
Chalmers Johnson, “Flying Blind Across the Paciﬁc,” Los Angeles Times, August
3, 1993, p. B7.
15
Speech at North Carolina State University, Raleigh, October 4, 1992, as cited inLeon V. Sigal, “The Last Cold War Election,” Foreign Affairs (Winter 1992/93), p. 14.
16
Sigal, “The Last Cold War Election,” p. 12.
17
On the NEC, see The Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland, theNational Security Council Project Oral History Roundtables, September 27, 2000, retrieved December 8, 2004 at http://www.brookings.edu/dybdocroot/fp/research/projects/nsc/transcripts/20000927.pdf
18
The United States Department of Labor deﬁnes “displaced workers” as “persons 20
years of age and older who lost or left jobs because their plant or company closed or
moved, there was insufﬁcient work for them to do, or their position or shift was abolished.” See Department of Labor, “Displaced Workers Summary” (Washington, D.C.:
Bureau of Labor Statistics), July 30, 2004, online: http://www.bls.gov/cps/[Access date: December 12, 2004].
19
Jacques Rancière, “Ten Theses on Politics,” trans. Rachel Bowlby & Davide
Panagia, Theory & Event 5:3 http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/tae/toc/index.html.
20
On this note, Japan’s popular level perception of the concept, “economic nationalism,” has been profoundly different than that of America. Japanese people, weary of thenegative attributes of nationalism after the war, rigorously pursued economic activities
precisely because they recognized economics as something other than nationalism. To
many people (except, of course, for the frequently publicized war-nostalgic), the terms“nationalism” or “patriotism” retained their prewar connotations as military-expansionist, heavily culturalist, negative ideologies. Rigorous rebuilding of homes and communities through economism was a way to recover from the ravages of nationalism.

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Ray Marshall and Marc Tucker, Thinking for a Living: Education and the Wealthof Nations (Basic Books, 1992).
22
Ray Marshall and Marc Tucker, Thinking for a Living, pp. 74, 146–163.
23
Lester Thurow, Head to Head: The Coming Battle Among Japan, Europe, andAmerica (New York: William Morrow, 1992).
24
Lester Thurow, Head to Head, p. 29. Thurow attributes the origin of the 3-nation
approach to the insights of George C. Lodge, Perestroika for America (Boston: Harvard
Business School Press, 1991), pp. 15–16, citied in Thurow, Head to Head, p. 32.
25
Thurow, Head to Head, p. 298.
26
In December 2004, barely over a decade after the airing of Challenge to America,
when the formal announcement came that the Chinese company Lenovo purchased
IBM’s personal computer business, pundits did not mourn the loss of a cultural symbol
to foreign predators. By now, IBM, like other transnational corporations, has become sointernally diversiﬁed as well as internationalized that the New York Times could safely
report, “The complex transaction is meant to serve as a bridge between very different
companies from different cultures.” IBM will continue to produce software and othergoods and services, so it will be beneﬁcial to ensure its stake in the Chinese company’s,
and country’s, success. See Steve Lohr, “Sale of IBM PC Unit is a Bridge between
Companies and Cultures,” New York Times [electronic edition], December 8, 2004.
27
Dana Frank, Buy American: The Untold Story of Economic Nationalism (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1999), p. 131.
28
Dana Frank, Buy American, pp. 139–143.
29
Dana Frank, Buy American, pp. 160–163.
30
Cited in Dana Frank, Buy American, p. 163
31
See Michael Renov, “Warring Images: Stereotype and American Representationsof the Japanese,” in Abé Mark Nornes and Fukushima Yukio, eds., The Japan-American
Film Wars: WWII Propaganda and Its Cultural Contexts (Chur, Switzerland: Harwood
Academic Publishers, 1994), pp. 95–118; John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Raceand Power in the Paciﬁc War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986); John W. Dower,“Japanese Cinema Goes to War,” Chapter 2 of John W. Dower, Japan in War and Peace:
Selected Essays (New York: New Press, 1993), pp. 33–54.
32
Michael Renov, 1994, p. 100.
33
Sander L. Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race andMadness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 12; cited in Michael Renov,“Warring Images,” p. 99.
34
Michael Renov, “Warring Images,” p. 99, adapted from Homi K. Bhaba, “The Other
Question—The Stereotype and Colonial Discourse,” Screen 24, no. 6 (NovemberDecember 1983), p. 27.
35
Michael Renov, “Warring Images,” p. 99, adapted from Gilman, Difference andPathology, p. 18.
36
I have adapted this idea from Ueno Toshiya, “Techno-Orientalism and Media
Tribalism: On Japanese Animation and Rave Culture,” Third Text 47 (Summer 1999),
pp. 95–98; Ueno adapted it from David Morley and Kevin Robins, The Space of Identity:
Global Media, Electronic Landscapes and Cultural Boundaries (Routledge, 1995).
37
Robert B. Reich, The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st Century
Capitalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), pp. 264–265.