Calculating the Costs: A Gender Analysis of Japanese Cars in Cold War America

Calculating the Costs:

Gender Analysis of Japanese Cars in Cold War America

Americans’ historic xenophobia toward Asians made it difficult for Asian automobile manufacturers to establish themselves in the United States.  They faced stiff competition, as the bigger, more glamorous American cars competed by exploiting presumed connections to masculinity and patriotism.  Their other rivals, the European imports, also shared with the United States a claim to authenticity and asserted superior craftsmanship.  Imported Japanese cars were foreign, but without being chic.  Compounding their efforts further, Americans approached Japanese cars as something not to be trusted.  The question of how Japanese companies and their small sedans not only broke into the American market, but also came to dominate it, is best answered with a gender analysis.  Men dominate our understanding of automotive culture, but this study reveals that women played a defining part in this social and economic transformation.

This paper explores women’s consumer role in shaping the American automotive culture from the late 1960s to the late 1980s.  It analyzes women’s experiences to ascertain what led them to choose Asian imports and considers the corporate decision to target women.  This effort is all the more remarkable because American automakers largely resisted appealing specifically to women into the 21^st century.  To understand these unwittingly revolutionary behaviors, this paper examines newspapers, women's magazines, business journals, corporate analyses of the automobile market, and advertisements for Japanese (and  Japanese-American) automobiles, and concludes that both American women and Japanese corporations made bold calculations in choosing each other.