The one thing that actually did happen historically after Japan’s modernization involving the US was an inequitable trade agreement between the two countries (one of the US’s first attempts at globalizing a “free trade” system inherently advantageous to themselves in terms of corporate plutocracy), reducing Japan to a sort of semi-colonial status. It failed to proceed elsewhere. The trade agreement where similar attempts at such a global geared trade platform succeeded (also founded on these sorts of inherent inequities, but at the “just right” balance the fish would find worth swallowing), at great cost to the working populations in each respective country, started as the FTA with Canada, and expanded into NAFTA, (where we lose even if we win, and it’s not ending any time soon, -did they ever pay up? –This says “nyet”). FTA/Nafta has also been employed to attack the Canadian Wheat Board many times, which is why our servile US-aping enabler of a Prime Minister, Tom Flanagan’s little pet, would goafter it (illegally). This can effectively stop us from enacting environmental legislation to protect ourselves, our land and our water at any level, and is not answerable to our government. When you’re the resource export side of the equation, this is hardly an equal issue, it is there to disenfranchise your population, -not the other way around.
It’s no surprise that they then attempted to broaden Nafta’s global reach as the MAI. The new form variant is the TPP (this is how it eff’s you overby defining “intellectual property”, -then there’s ACTA). It’s obvious why this trade foray does not make press. (This is what it will do to your food.) Such subjects are conspicuously evaded, as they are also a defining aspect of US character. (This is how the agreement constitutes the institutionalizing of global corporate plutocracy and the abrogation of national sovereignty, i.e., fascism, rightfully dubbed “Nafta on steroids”.)
Once you gut your manufacturing base (and exhaust your resources), your last canard is the colonization of “intellectual property”. Once again, here perfectly in tandem comes the great feel good “Google movie” to work as counteractive deflection to Google exec’s technocratic “soft power” manifesto (with the usual attendant hubris), blithely ignoring the inextricable reality that soft power’s potency to coerce has its basis in the implicit threat of reinforcement by military power when and if soft power doesn’t work, an existent omnipresent threat as military power is constantly and simultaneously applied.
“Americans are benevolently ignorant about Canada, while Canadians are malevolently well informed about the US.” - J. Bartlet Brebner
–As an added aside, a likely real target of the financial aspect of the TPP is the destruction of the Canadian banking system (the big 5), so we can be bankrupted by the utter corruption unleashed by financial deregulation and preyed upon just as adroitly as the United States’ (and now EU) middle class has been as an unlimited tax sieve of nigh unlimited financial hemorrhage.
-Oh and, more fun and games with Canada and Japan.