In the 1980s, American policymakers saw Japanese chip makers as their biggest threat.
With a smile on her face, American Congresswoman Helen Delich Bentley took turns with fellow lawmakers to swing sledgehammers and smash a Toshiba stereo on the grounds of the Capitol.
“Treachery by any other name is still treachery,” Bentley told the assembled journalists. “But if it had another name, it would be Toshiba.”
The incident occurred in July 1987, when the Japanese electronics giant faced controversy centred around the United States’s national interests and its quest to maintain tech hegemony on a global stage.
One of Toshiba’s divisions had sold a critical piece of technology to the former Soviet Union, aiding it in developing advanced submarines. Such exchanges with the Soviet military at the peak of the Cold War were seen as a cardinal sin by the American lawmakers. read more here