The Chrysanthemum and the Sword

Someone my age might roll his eyes at Roger Sterling's intense desire to not do business with the Japanese, but apparently this was very much a real thing:

[Jerry] Jones simply was tap dancing as fast as he could, trying to find a way to put together a $140 million package that would keep him in the running with dozens of “big boy” bidders. Besides [Los Angeles Lakers owner Jerry Buss] there was a Japanese group said to be “price insensitive.” A source close to the sale says, “The Japanese were ready to make an offer with no real sense of how much the Dallas Cowboys were worth. To them it was like, ‘Oh, Dallas Cowboys! How much? Two hundred million? Three hundred?’ [Tom] Landry might have coached for another century if the Japanese had bought the team. But World War II had a profound effect on Bum. He just wasn’t comfortable with the thought of selling the Dallas Cowboys to the Japanese, whether or not the league would have approved it.

And that was in 1989.