US industry in the 1980s felt under siege from foreign competitors, and pointed to rising shares of imports in their home market and falling shares of US exports in world markets. Attention was drawn to a host of foreign practices that apparently help to explain the increased competition from foreigners, ranging from specific export promotional tactics and specific import prohibitions to broadly drawn industrial policies and industrial targeting that allegedly provided impetus to foreign exports and simultaneously discouraged imports from the US and elsewhere. These practices in one variant or another were discovered to be widespread, being used not only by other industrial countries, but by less developed countries as well, particularly the newly industrialized countries such as Korea and Brazil. But Japan was held up as the main culprit, not so much because its practices were more extensive than those in other countries, as we will see, but because they were somewhat mysterious and lost behind Japanese reticence and linguistic ambiguity, and above all because Japan emerged as the most successful competitor in a number of industries in which Americans had hitherto considered themselves unrivaled. It is foreign success rather than the practices themselves – which in many cases existed for many years and in the case of Japan actually diminished in importance – which gave rise to such widespread concern, and led to calls for US action ranging from retaliation to emulation.