Stuart Isett--Sygma for TIME

The New Battle Cry: If You Can't Beat 'Em, Join 'Em
By TIM LARIMER Tokyo

In a Japanese television advertisement for a canned coffee drink, a frustrated salaryman is in a bar, venting about globalization. "The Japanese are being ridiculed by the world!" he laments. "We need to strike back." Just then, an American, a dead ringer for Bill Clinton, approaches him. "OK," he says, "give me your frank opinion. Strike back." The salaryman fidgets, pauses and takes a sip of his coffee. Nothing more is said.

Caffeine-in-a-can to the rescue of global friction? It might sound odd, but the message strikes a chord with many Japanese who share the salaryman's ambivalent attitude toward foreigners. A prolonged, numbing recession has stirred feelings of both jealousy and admiration toward a U.S. economy that's barreling along at a pace Japanese themselves had become accustomed to in the 1980s. An already complicated relationship with foreigners is being tested as investors are, in the words of one Japanese stockbroker, "circling like vultures," looking for ailing companies to gobble up at depressed prices. According to a report by KPMG Corporate Finance, a Tokyo investment adviser arm of the accounting firm KPMG, last year's 61 major foreign investments totaling 1.35 trillion yen ($11.2 billion at the current exchange rate) doubled the total in yen terms for the previous five years combined. Deals once considered unthinkable are now becoming routine: the U.S. tire company Goodyear's interest in Sumitomo Rubber Industries; GE Capital's still pending $6.5 billion acquisition of Japan Leasing; an alliance between Travelers Group and Nikko Securities. Behind this merger mania are the sputtering economy, ailing companies with low stock value, a rare and perhaps fleeting chance to invest in areas previously closed to outsiders and a gradual disintegration of keiretsu, the networks of companies doing business together.

Despite all the talk of a Nissan sale, most of the deals do not involve household names selling consumer products but instead less prominent firms in the finance sector. So people may not yet be aware of outsiders chipping away at the Japan Inc. empire. "No Japanese politician has been smashing up a Ford Taurus," says Soichi Nakamura, a partner at KPMG in Tokyo.

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