It has been about a month since United States Steel (USS) announced it’s being acquired by Japan’s Nippon Steel Corp. I’ve watched curiously for reactions. I find it interesting that local reaction has seemed somewhat subdued, even underwhelming. To the contrary, I’ve heard from older, relocated Pittsburghers who greeted the news with great regret, even with evocations of Pearl Harbor.

Yes, seriously. And if some people today, in 2024, find that comparison overheated, well, then you don’t know what it was like to live in this area in the 1970s and 1980s when the steel industry was in decline and fears were at a fever pitch over a “Japanese takeover.”

A reader named David, who grew up in Pittsburgh in the heyday of the industry, emailed me from Santa Barbara, where he moved decades ago. His reaction was instructive:

“I had the privilege of being raised in Western Pennsylvania shortly after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor,” wrote David. “U.S. Steel Corp. , founded in 1901 by Andrew Carnegie, became the centerpiece of a domestic industrial behemoth which produced more muscular war tonnage in the Pittsburgh region than all of America’s allies combined.”

David reveled in how the men of this region “worked the area’s numerous heavy-duty factories which churned out the armored plate for battleships and fighter jets.” He remembered these men fondly as “a sight to behold.” Between roughly Christmas 1941 and the summer of 1943, they assembled “the greatest arsenal and war machine the world had ever witnessed.”

A knowledgeable man and good writer, David waxed eloquent on what Pittsburgh’s steel industry meant to the globe during the dark days of Hitler and Hirohito. David then pivoted to the news of December 2023, which he framed quite negatively: “The announcement today that America’s iconic steel company, the very symbol of the nation’s strength, power and wealth — United States Steel Corp. — is being auctioned off (to) Nippon Steel Corp. of Japan could be viewed somewhere down the road by historians as the real beginning of the end for America’s greatness.” David closed dramatically: “U.S. Steel Corporation: Rest in Peace.” He said of those in the wartime factories: “May Their Memories Be A Blessing.”

To many readers today, especially those under the age of 40, David’s lament will seem strange. Some might even see it as xenophobic. But I’ll tell them emphatically: You need to know what it was once like in this area, especially among our dads and relatives who worked in steel.

I grew up in the ’70s and ’80s. The idea of Japan’s Nippon Steel buying U.S. Steel would have once launched a mass insurrection of Pittsburgh steelworkers. The Japanese then, decades after Pearl Harbor, were such a rival to the steel industry that in these parts they were often viewed as an enemy still. I remember a college roommate had the window of his Toyota smashed out with a brick when it was parked downtown. When he looked at his car in shock, a passerby snarled, “That’s what you get for buying that (bleeping) rice-burner!”

How times have changed.

I told David in response to his email, attempting to calm him down, that the words “USX” quite a while ago were replaced with “UPMC” atop the downtown skyscraper. He was well aware. He described that change as a “metaphor” for, well, something he didn’t like. He, and we, are forever Pittsburgh Steelers.

David lamented: “Except for the magnificent Holy Trinity, there are beginnings and ends for everything — even great civilizations. We go through a cycle of confidence, to hubris, back to confidence, then to self-doubt, then to ‘who cares.’”

Those two final words from David hit me the hardest. A Japanese buyout of Pittsburgh steel 50 years ago would have been treated in these parts as almost akin to another Pearl Harbor. Today, among many contemporary Pittsburghers, it seems to elicit a mere “who cares.”

Can you imagine that? I can’t. What a different world.

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