Japan Tries to Reclaim Its Clout as a 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.

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.

Michael Crichton’s 1992 thriller, “Rising Sun,” with its dark depiction of Japan’s ruthless economic warriors, ruled the best-seller lists, alongside nonfiction titles that warned of the financial and technology juggernaut created by Japan’s powerful government trade ministry.

In a 1990 survey, nearly two-thirds of Americans said Japanese investment in the United States posed a threat to American economic independence.

It turned out that the anxiety about Japan Inc. 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.