Two Tokyo Olympics Show the Long Arc of Japan’s Tech Decline
Suga’s government is vying to recapture some of its lost chip industry verve as the world is increasingly defined by technology.
The ‘Shinkansen’ bullet train passing a rice field in 1968. The unveiling of the bullet heralded the dawn of a high-tech era in Japan.
Photographer: Dean Conger/Corbis Historical/Getty Images
When Tokyo last hosted the Olympics, in 1964, the unveiling of a bullet train capable of the improbable speed of 210 kilometers an hour (130 mph) heralded the dawn of a high-tech era in Japan.
Within a decade and a half, innovations such as Sony Corp.’s videocassette recorder, Toshiba Corp. flash memory and Space Invaders, the arcade shoot-em up that revolutionized the gaming industry, made Japan synonymous with global technological superiority, and the talk was of it overtaking the U.S. as the world’s biggest economy.