After starting out as an importer of American semiconductors in the 1970s, Japan rapidly rose to dominate the chip industry, surpassing the U.S. in global sales of memory chips by 1982 and accounting for 51 percent of the global semiconductor market by 1988. The meteoric rise was made possible by massive government investments: Semiconductor R&D accounted for 26 percent of Japan’s total R&D spending in 1977. Further, private-public partnerships allowed Japan’s leading tech companies to collabor