[com2kid]

> Microprocessors: Is this even market? There's 3, Intel, AMD, Arm (I know ARM is a standard) but I don't get what makes Japan's "failure" here special.

Japan used to be on the leading edge of microprocessor design. They aren't anymore.

> semiconductor foundries: Why should Japan have excelled here vs any other country?

Because they used to be a contender.

> smartphones: Japan led the world until iPhone then everyone was catching up. Nokia, Ericsson, Microsoft. Japan didn't lose here because of anything unique to Japan.

Japanese cellphones were literally what defined a Galapagos technology (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gal%C3%A1pagos_syndrome), they were designed in country and only ever intended for the domestic market.

[jeffbee]

> Because they used to be a contender.

Yeah and it's easy to forget. Every big Japanese company used to make their own silicon. It was easy for them to make knock-off 6502s and the entire Texas Instruments product line at half the price (See: Nintendo). Japan had almost the whole global DRAM market by the end of the 1980s. Americans, in a panic, formed a quasi-governmental bailout scheme called SEMATECH to re-establish the competitiveness of the moribund domestic computer industry. People seriously feared Japan was going to eclipse the American economy. Their kids, after all, were good at math tests.

[com2kid]

> People seriously feared Japan was going to eclipse the American economy.

California is the only thing that keeps America competitive.

Without doing any research to back it up, I'll gladly claim that Silicon Valley (along with Microsoft[1] throughout the 90s/early 2000s) has driven the majority of the world's GDP growth in the last 30 years. The VC funding model for companies, the willingness to take risks, and the insane (over)work ethic, is why technology has exploded and impacted every aspect of life.

[1] Love it or hate it, a single unified target for business and consumer computer applications was a huge boon to the world. Just look at all the massive efficiency losses having to support 2 smartphone platforms, and that is with each having addressable markets in the billions. Now imagine if there had been 5 different PC platforms in the 90s to write for, with only hundreds of thousands of users on each one worldwide.

[rippercushions]

Japan peddled its own tech like PDC, i-Mode etc pretty hard overseas, and at one point Sony, Panasonic etc were serious contenders in the mobile phone business. It's kind of striking how they completely managed to fail.