A belief still prevalent in america has it that Japanese manufacturers' stunning successes in the 1970s and 1980s can be traced to the industrial policies of MITI, the Ministry of International Trade & Industry. By bringing big firms together into research and development consortia focused on problems like large-scale integrated (LSI) circuits, the story goes, MITI enabled Japanese companies to gain market share in new industries faster than American firms with their go-it-alone approach. The Clinton administration admired this model so much that by 1996 it had given $1.3 billion to the U.S. Display Consortium, a Silicon Valley group formed to take back the lead in the domestic market for flat-panel displays.

The reality, however, is almost the opposite, at least in the consumer electronics industry, freelance technology journalist Bob Johnstone argues in his important new book We Were Burning (a Japanese expression meaning, "We couldn't wait; we had a can-do spirit"). Japanese inventor-entrepreneurs were simply the first to see the commercial possibilities in American-born technologies such as metal oxide semiconductor (MOS) chips and liquid crystal displays (LCDs), enabling Japanese electronics firms to beat American companies at their own game.