[Dalewyn]

>Japan is one of the foremost funders of deep research.

Perhaps they were once upon a time, it's questionable if they still are today.

And anyway, that's not even the real problem Japan's R&D world has: The real problem is that Japan can't bring products to market. If you can't make some money your R&D is going to eventually run out of gas and die.

Japan is also poorer than its financials might suggest. Japanese society shuns pioneering, the road not yet taken might as well be the plague; everyone wants to be #2 or lower, not #1. This means a lot of Japanese capital ends up sitting around doing nothing besides accruing petty interest, only a small fraction gets budgeted for pioneering into the new and the unknown after significant disparagement.