The eighties was when Japan had really transitioned from producing cheap consumer goods for the US market to producing a lot of high-tech electronics and cars, with the low-tech consumer goods instead being manufactured further down the supply chain. There was a lot of fear-mongering over the threat that Japan's tech industry posed to American tech dominance. I don't know that the CIA was behind that, though, since at least the State Department policy since the 1950s had been to build up Japan as a more privileged client state that would serve as a hub for what was basically a recreation of the old Imperial Japanese Co-Prosperity Sphere as an arm of American hegemony and imperial wealth extraction in the Pacific and Asia; Japan's rising prominence and utility to the US market was a problem for some individual capitalists and some sectors of American labor aristocracy, but was actively part of American geopolitical strategy and overall very beneficial to American capitalism (and the same can be said of China opening as a market which broke the stagnation and decay that otherwise could have been the ruin of American capitalism, despite the damage it did to some American capitalists and some sectors of American labor aristocracy).