Mass-market American fiction dealing with the experience of places defined as \u27Japanese\u27 has, in the post-war era, shown a movement away from a concept of Japanese place as something exotic, contained, and linked to the past, and towards an understanding of it as an unavoidable and invasive part of the American future. This article takes James Michener\u27s Sayonara (1953) and Michael Crichton\u27s Rising Sun (1992) as early and late examples of the ways in which Japanese place has been constructed as the \u27other\u27 against which American senses of spatial and cultural identity have been defined. It concludes that images of Japan and Japanese spaces in mass-market American fiction have altered dramatically while the culturally specific geo-spatial assumptions that inform the construction and use of those images have remained largely unchanged
