Japan tries to reclaim its clout as global tech leader

China's envy-inducing success in using industrial policy to expand its economy and finance green manufacturing has helped kick off a fevered scrimmage among nations to develop and protect their own hometown businesses.

- PATRICIA COHEN & RIVER AKIRA DAVIS

It has been 40 years since such competitive anxieties about a rising Asian power prompted this kind of embrace of government intervention among the biggest free-market economies.

Only then it was Japan, not China, that was the source of unease.

In a 1990 survey, nearly twothirds of Americans said Japanese investment in the United States posed a threat to American economic independence. It turned out that the anxiety about Japan peaked just as the country began a long economic slide after the collapse of real estate and stock market bubbles.

Now, after a period of stagnation that Japan's economy ministry refers to as "the lost three decades," Tokyo is engaged in a multibillion-dollar industrial policy to jump-start the lackluster economy and recapture its position as a tech innovator.

This time, Japan is working with technology leaders in the United States and other countries ― a collaborative approach that decades earlier would have been unthinkable.

But even as Tokyo is pursuing less inward-looking policies, the political storm over a Japanese-led acquisition of US Steel illustrates how the US is increasingly moving to protect other key industries from foreign influence.