There was quite a bit of fear of Japan back in the… late ’80s? Certainly the ’90s. Japan was buying up a lot of US property, like China is now, and there were scare-mongering articles and news stories about it. I might have bought into it given enough time—the MSM does chip away at one—but finally read some level-headed analysis about it somewhere that explained two key reasons the whole thing was silly–

• Both the Dutch and the English owned more of the US.
• The Japanese were mostly just getting soaked by predatory realtors who exploited their naïveté.