The US-China trade dispute has raised fears of a full-blown commercial war. But trade battles aren't new. If you grew up in the 1980s, as CGTN's Owen Fairclough did, there are some striking similarities with Japan during that period.

From Back to the Future to Footloose, Japanese tech was the sound of the 1980s. The Sony Walkman symbolized Japan's global dominance in consumer electronics - the reminders now found mainly in retro tech collections like this computer museum outside Baltimore.

BOB ROSWELL OWNER, SYSTEM SOURCE COMPUTER MUSEUM "Sony Walkman hit the market. The original one here is going to use cassettes and now people can take their music with them."

And if the US had cutting-edge gaming consoles like Atari, Japan had the games.

OWEN FAIRCLOUGH HUNT VALLEY, MARYLAND "When I was growing up, my parents thought gaming was bad for me, so I spent the 1980s looking for every opportunity I could to play Pac-Man - a Japanese arcade game that summed up its technological brilliance."

But while it was dominating the gaming universe, Japan was locked in a trade battle with the US. Japan was accused of undercutting American manufacturing by flooding the US with cars and microchips it effectively subsidized, while blocking US access to its own markets. The US retaliated with quotas on Japanese imports. The two sides eventually agreed to a solution - the US lowering the value of the dollar and Japan raising the value of the yen to try to smooth out a growing trade imbalance. And yet economists concluded this trade battle, intended to protect both countries' economies, actually damaged them both.

Some experts say that period contributed to years of economic stagnation in Japan, where sustained growth has only recently returned.

DAN IKENSON CATO INSTITUTE "It was in the popular narrative that Japan was coming and we'd all need to know how to say 'I surrender' in Japanese. That dissipated because Japan became more of a stagnant economy."

But the parallels between Japan in the 1980s and China today are limited.

DAN IKENSON CATO INSTITUTE "Back in those days when we imposed duties on steel or voluntary export restraints on autos we weren't hurting our own domestic interests. Now, today, 50 percent of the value of US imports are intermediate goods, capital equipment, raw materials - purchases that the US manufactures so they can compete in the global economy. So resorting to protectionism now is much more costly."

As for Japan's world-class gadgets, they were eclipsed by the smartphone revolution and never recovered.

BOB ROSWELL OWNER, SYSTEM SOURCE COMPUTER MUSEUM "Cellphones have replaced all kinds of gadgets that the Japanese used to make. And the Japanese just haven't been players in that market."

But Japanese cars are world renowned. And its gadget reputation lives on in movies like Transformers while Guardians of the Galaxy just wouldn't be the same without Starlord's Walkman mixtape - OFA CGTN Maryland.