https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Japan-lose-its-technology-leadership-to-other-countries-like-the-US
from "Tisho Yanchev"
Japan never had a technology leadership, that’s just a facade they portray for the world to see and think of them, in reality, Japan is extremely backwards in terms of technology, they always were, they still use fax machines to communicate, and most computers still use IE, if you have lived in Japan you would know that. They put millions into robotics just to produce a good looking robot that is completely 100% useless and can’t do anything other than look nice and futuristic, try comparing the Boston Dynamics robots versus any robot produced in Japan, see the difference for yourself, during the Fukushima disaster, they didn’t have any robot to send there that could be of any use, all their robots can only smile, sing and look cool, but can’t do anything practical. I have done extensive research and i can say with confidence that everything you see in Japan is a copy cat of America or Europe, when the American companies literally created the gaming industry, beginning from the first Arcade games, Nintendo wasn’t even a gaming company, they became a gaming company only after they acquired a license to distribute the American games in Japan. If you look at the early models of Honda, Toyota and their car brands, they are 100% copy cat from the Europeans, mostly the Germans and French. Their movie ‘’hits’’ were too all copies from the American movies. Japan has invented nothing, and copied everything. They copy something created someplace else, change few elements, and then popularize it to the world as their own invention. They have successfully created the myth that they are technologically advanced, because it is in the core of their culture to focus on the image other than the content, they focus on making things look good, rather than actually BE good, they put so much efforts to create this false and twisted image (mask) of themselves and it works apparently. Everything is about the image in Japan, not the content. Anyone who has lived there knows this.
from "Martin Basinger"
This pattern is at the base of the Japanese economic boom as well as the Chinese economic boom of the last few decades - Western companies contract East Asian suppliers, and see their IP stolen and copied as a side effect. Most Japanese have forgotten that most of the wealth Japan was able to amass during their economic bubble was not earned through legal means.
It seems like a western exceptionalist (even white supremacist) argument made to downplay any achievements by Japanese people or other Asians.
This is the central thesis of Bob Johnstone's We Were Burning: Japanese Entrepreneurs and the Forging of the Electronic Age, at least specifically regarding electronic technology. Broadly, the Japanese have had an economy focused more on refining than coming up with something "entirely new", but our definition of "entirely new" is misled in itself. Early innovations in electricity were a European enterprise, but we say Thomas Edison created both the light bulb and sound recording because he made them viable. Sony made Color TV viable yet we call them "derivative".
What's important to understand is that after WWII, there was no infrastructure for R&D. Through the various whims of the Economic Miracle, they did manage to get back on their feet and started to get interest from America electronics companies, but not many as it's important to note. AT&T basically had little interest in governing the transistor patent and therefore it became free for use there. RCA set up a school to get interested people on their side with new technological knowledge, and of course this helped JVC come into existence.
It is certainly a trend that the Japanese are less concerned with the "cutting edge" and more focused on delivering consumer-oriented technology. Time and time again it's been proven that a consumer marketplace isn't necessarily going to buy something just because it's "better". It needs to be packaged and it needs to be affordable. Japanese companies did not invent home video formats, optical media, or robotics but they defined all of these areas. to say there's no innovation in that is to throw out many other innovators like, say, Steve Jobs.
You can see the ergonomic genius of the Japanese at work in some of their other inventions. For example: the QR Code, the gel pen, the lithium-ion battery, and the blue laser. All of these things have affected our daily lives and it's silly to dismiss them simply because they were not at the very origin point of some fundamental issue.
Now the concern of legality over patents (particular US ones) regarding technology in Japan has largely been overblown. There have always been issues because of the way that Japanese law is written, though I am far from an expert on this. I think it has to do with people lumping grey market Hong Kong goods and Japanese goods into the same category. A company like Sony, even when they were a small company, were never duplicitous. They got a license to manufacture transistors, and by the time they were working on Trinitron the fundamental patents on television technology were already out in the open. The Japanese are hard-driving businessmen, but they're not so brash and stupid as to meet with a company, get a 'no', and then start reverse engineering the technology. Anybody who makes this complaint about Japanese undercutting has to be way more specific about what technologies they felt were "stolen" and who was doing it. Otherwise, just ignore them because they don't have a case.
So Japan for the largest time has been a consumer market. Yes they have a large scientific community, but most of the big discoveries are in biology, not 'technology' as such. The Japanese are industrious and will work to improve something rather than just leaving a good idea to die on the vine.
A couple other sources about early electronics with some comments on the Japanese response:
Inventing the Electronic Century: The Epic Story of the Consumer Electronics and Consumer Industries by Alfred D Chandler
The Big Score: The Billion Dollar Story of Silicon Valley by Michael S Malone.