Locals knew the aging yarn mill near the banks of the Chattahoochee River was in dire straits, but few were ready for the news about who was coming to save it. A Japanese investor, rumor had it, had bought the plant and was dispatching an executive from Tokyo to turn things around. "Unbearable," thought accountant Vicki Bush, who had worked at the Columbus, Georgia, mill for more than 10 years. Like several of her colleagues, she started hunting for a new job. The way she saw it, the Japanese were "slave drivers," she says. Even worse, she'd heard that in their companies, "women didn't have a place."

That was in 1989, the year the Japanese bought a controlling stake in Rockefeller Center and Japan bashing in the U.S. reached fever pitch. Washington's trade disputes with Tokyo dominated the headlines and fear ran high that Japan was heading toward global economic supremacy. Bush, however, decided to stay at the company, Swift Spinning, after her new Japanese boss personally urged her not to leave. She's now a vice president and sits at a large, maple desk surrounded by framed photographs of her children. "He treated me fair," Bush, 43, says of her first Japanese boss. "He offered me opportunities I don't know that I would have had otherwise."

Swift got just as lucky. Japanese money and management transformed the company, one of the oldest in this southern textile town, from a dying factory into the second-largest producer of combed-cotton yarn in the U.S. The town, meanwhile, began to change as a handful of Japanese companies also set up shop here. But jobs, investment and management techniques weren't all that was rolling in from across the Pacific. With them came around 200 Japanese families—bosses, customers and classmates—who drastically changed locals' views of a nation most knew only from the news. Today, what residents have to say about Japan ranges from the good to the bad to the cautiously polite, but one thing's certain: the glory of Japan Inc. may have faded, but its impact still reverberates through the economy and lives of people in communities like this one.

Columbus seems an unlikely place for a Japan-led renaissance. Founded as a trading outpost in 1828, it spawned a booming textile industry powered by water from the Chattahoochee's falls. Its current population of 210,000 makes it the second-largest city in the state, a misleading distinction for a place that remains awash in small-town feel. Restaurants rarely stay open past 9 p.m. and you're hard pressed to find a store clerk who isn't ready with a kind word and a smile. Stately old mansions overlook main streets, while weathered shotgun houses—the mill worker's traditional dwelling—huddle in rows beneath the brick factories that line the riverfront. The contrast hints at the town's social divisions—rich and poor, black and white, insiders and outsiders. "Columbus has always been a town of haves and have-nots," says Terry Hurley, owner of Dinglewood Pharmacy. "You were either from Columbus or you weren't. It was a hard town to break into."

That didn't stop several Japanese companies from moving here, including giants Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. and Marubeni Corp., as well as smaller outfits like steel-parts maker Oneda Corp. For them, Columbus offered a large labor pool, cheap land and abundant natural resources—not to mention golf courses, country clubs and spacious homes for their transplanted executives. It is also less than a two-hour drive from the state capital Atlanta, where Japanese expats go to dine out or buy groceries. Still, Japanese businessmen aren't complete strangers to Hurley's old-fashioned drugstore, where they come to tuck into one of his locally famous chili dogs. "They aren't chit-chatty," he remarks. Aside from the occasional lunch at his place, "I never see them in the restaurants around here," Hurley says.

Many Japanese executives tend to be somewhat isolated socially, staying at home with their families when not on the job. Hiroko Nakamura, an 11-year resident of Columbus, says she still cooks Japanese food every night and the family eats like they did in their hometown in rural Niigata prefecture—sitting on the living room floor. "My husband couldn't get used to the kitchen table," she says. Children integrate more easily, attending local schools and picking up the language and fads of their U.S. peers. "The kids don't want to go back to Japan," says Nakamura, who must strike a balance between the two cultures. Every morning she wakes up at 5:30 a.m. to make a traditional Japanese box lunch of rice, fish and pickles for her husband Ken, an Oneda executive. Then she prepares a ham sandwich for Yutaka, her high-school-age son—a typical sack lunch for any American kid. From the outside, few would realize that the family living in this modest, ranch-style house isn't from around here. The only clue is a tiny Japanese charm dangling from the rearview mirror of a car in the driveway.

It's the quiet, understated presence of the Japanese—and the money they bring in—that facilitated their acceptance into Columbus' close-knit community. "We're welcomed because it's good business," says Kazue Schmitz, who teaches Japanese to Americans in local schools and is married to a Columbus weatherman. "They don't see us as a threat." Matsushita opened four battery plants in the town starting in 1989, employing about 1,100 people, and Oneda's factory, online since 1989, employs about 100 workers. Marubeni, which bought Swift from the original Japanese investor in 1993, spent $200 million revamping and expanding the company's operations to include a new, state-of-the-art denim plant and yarn mill. For Swift, the changes couldn't have come at a better time. The American textile industry was entering a recession brought on by cheaper manufacturing costs outside the U.S. In the words of one employee who works at Swift's old mill downtown, if the Japanese hadn't come along, "this place would have been a condo complex."

Swift, founded in 1906, looks at first glance like any U.S. company. An American flag flies atop the downtown mill and almost all 1,200 employees are locals. Look a little closer, however, and you're likely to see a Japanese engineer practicing his golf swing in front of the denim plant. Or step inside the new mills: they're packed with computers and robots in an impressive display of the technology for which Japan is famous. Shiro Kobayashi, Swift's chairman and one of only two Japanese permanently on staff, says Marubeni has taken a relatively hands-off approach to operating the company. "You could basically say that this place is still 100% run by Americans," says Kobayashi. As for drastic changes in management practices: "That's not Japanese style," he says. "We stick with the original, American way of running things."

Swift employees agree, and few have complaints about their Japanese bosses. Still, managers have had some adjusting to do. "They do not like risks," Richard Cardwell, senior vice president for sales, says of the Asian owners. He had trouble convincing Marubeni to expand business into Haiti, a place the Japanese felt was too unstable. "That's been a pet gripe of mine," says Cardwell. He also cites language difficulties, echoing the sentiments of managers around town who admit that Japanese and American employees often resort to drawing pictures when trying to communicate. When the Japanese first arrived, "a meeting that should take 15 minutes would take an hour because it had to be done in both languages," says David Edwards, an employee at Oneda.

Edwards, who as a boy hunted doves in the woods where the factory he works now sits, shares the impression many locals have of Japan. "I find that the Japanese are a lot like Southerners," he says. "Courteous, polite: they have a real sense of history. Southern life is comfortable with them." Like Edwards, most residents express only positive feelings for their Japanese colleagues. Swift's Kobayashi, in fact, thinks U.S.-style courtesy can go too far. "There's a lot more kissing up in an American company," he says, turning on its head the notion of Japanese workers as masters in the art of kowtowing. In U.S. companies, Kobayashi speculates, workers view their boss as having the power to fire them, whereas in a Japanese firm such power is not in the hands of any one person. "Here," he says, "people seem reluctant to disagree with me."

Other Japanese managers struggle to find their way in an American workplace where the responsibility on the individual employee is great. "In Japan there's always a guideline, a manual," says Ryotaro Okuda, a Tokyo native working at the headquarters of Columbus-based insurer Aflac Inc., which does the majority of its business in Japan. "Here you have to develop your own. You always have to educate yourself."

The surge of Japanese into Columbus that began in the late '80s was not without cultural friction. Mako Nakai, a Tokyo native and longtime Columbus resident, worked as a go-between for local officials and Japanese executives and recalls one incident in the early '90s. A rumor spread around town that Matsushita was discriminating against African Americans. "I had to go to all the Japanese companies and demand they show us their hiring figures," she says. The data revealed hiring practices were fair, but a smattering of distrust remained. The atmosphere is more relaxed today, and Columbus has become more cosmopolitan. Beginning Japanese language classes are currently offered alongside French and Spanish in the public schools.

A tougher test of relations may be on the horizon. Some 360 jobs were lost in March when Matsushita's storage battery plant moved to Mexico. A local plant spokesman and employees refused to talk about the closing, but Gene Chestnutt, an official in the Columbus office of the Georgia Department of Labor, says the trauma was minimal because most workers were relocated to other plants. Still, analysts say continued globalization and less flush times may mean more of the same. "It's inevitable and unavoidable to see the manufacturing firms move out of the industrialized countries to emerging markets where the labor is much cheaper," says Masaaki Kanno, chief economist at J.P. Morgan Tokyo. For the moment, with the downward slide of the Japanese economy, companies with well-established Columbus operations are cutting costs by bringing some executives home. "It's more economical, and things run smoother if we leave it to the local people," says Junji Kanegawa, a Matsushita spokesman in Tokyo. The locals, meanwhile, unlike a decade ago, no longer worry about the Japanese arriving. Now their main fear is that they might go away.

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