WASHINGTON—The White House is looking at the U.S. trade fight against Japan in the 1980s and 1990s for lessons in its trade battle against China. But the two eras are as striking for their differences as they are for their similarities.

U.S. trade officials admire Ronald Reagan’s use of tariffs to get Japan to open its semiconductor market and limit steel and other exports to the U.S. Current Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, then a midlevel U.S. official, helped carry out that strategy.

Japan back then, like China today, ran a large trade surplus with the U.S. Japan, like China, used industrial policy to turn favored companies into global powers and like China was looking to get U.S. technology any way it could.

The main tool the U.S. used to get Japan to change course, section 301 of the U.S. Trade Act of 1974, is the one the Trump administration is using to confront China. It gives the president broad powers to retaliate through tariffs and other means in trade disputes. “The last time it was used [with Japan], it worked,” says Clyde Prestowitz, a prominent Republican trade warrior from that era.

But even Mr. Prestowitz doubts such tactics will work again.