A Japanese automaker beat Ford and GM for car sales. Nobody panicked.

Americana.
(Image credit: Illustrated | iStock)

For the first time ever, a foreign company has topped the charts in U.S. auto sales. Toyota sold more vehicles in America than any other company in 2021, ending a General Motors streak that went back at least 60 years.

There was a time when this news would have caused a cultural panic. "Japan Inc." was an American national obsession in the 1980s, with a flood of alarmist books, magazine articles, and xenophobic movies fretting over how the United States had lost its economic mojo to a country it had devastated at war just 40 years earlier. A lot of that anxiety was centered on the automotive industry: The 1986 comedy Gung Ho featured Michael Keaton as an autoworker experiencing culture clashes — and not a little bit of nationalist distress — when his plant is bought by Japanese outsiders to make Toyota-style cars.

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Joel Mathis, The Week US

Joel Mathis is a writer with 30 years of newspaper and online journalism experience. His work also regularly appears in National Geographic and The Kansas City Star. His awards include best online commentary at the Online News Association and (twice) at the City and Regional Magazine Association.