China Is Emerging as an AI Power. Japan Is Still Looking for Someone to Blame

Kimi, an AI model developed by the Chinese startup Moonshot AI, has recently attracted attention for its strong performance.

Looking at the AI industry today, the United States and China increasingly appear to be its two main centers of power. Whenever an important new model is released, it is usually built by a company from one of those countries.

And Japan?

Unfortunately, Japanese companies are rarely mentioned in conversations about the world’s most advanced AI models.

What caught my attention, however, was not the technology itself. It was the comments beneath a Japanese news article about it.

The most popular comment made roughly this argument:

“The United States destroyed Japan’s semiconductor industry decades ago. Without that interference, Japan would now occupy the position China holds today.”

I have heard versions of this claim many times.

Why the Semiconductor Agreement Still Shapes This Debate

Readers outside Japan may not be familiar with the history behind that comment.

In the 1980s, Japanese semiconductor companies had become formidable global competitors. The United States accused Japanese producers of selling chips abroad at unfairly low prices and argued that foreign companies lacked adequate access to the Japanese market.

Under intense trade pressure from Washington, Japan signed the U.S.–Japan Semiconductor Agreement in 1986. The agreement introduced new pricing oversight and market-access commitments. Japanese chipmakers were undoubtedly affected, and many people in Japan still remember the episode as an attempt by the United States to weaken a successful rival.

American pressure was real. It would be dishonest to deny that history.

But I hesitate when that fact is used to conclude that America’s actions explain Japan’s present-day technological stagnation.

If external pressure alone determined a country’s technological future, China should already have been pushed out of the race.

The opposite has happened.

China Did Not Stop When the Route Became Difficult

The United States has restricted China’s access to advanced semiconductor manufacturing equipment, high-performance GPUs, and other technologies needed for AI development.

Chinese companies responded by searching for other routes. They developed more of their own technology, adapted to limited resources, and continued releasing new AI models.

There are many legitimate arguments about China’s political system, and I have my own concerns. But if we look only at technological development, one point is difficult to deny: China did not end the conversation with, “We were obstructed, so there was nothing we could do.”

What did Japan do during the same broad period?

Even as the global economy shifted toward software, many Japanese companies remained attached to the formulas that had made them successful in hardware. A large domestic market had allowed them to remain profitable for years, so there was less urgency to rebuild industries around global changes.

Organizations became highly skilled at avoiding failure, but relatively few became equally skilled at taking new risks.

Blame Is Appealing Because It Gives Us a Villain

This explanation is not very popular because it does not offer a single villain.

It is much more satisfying to say:

• The United States was to blame.
• The sharp appreciation of the yen made Japanese exports uncompetitive.
• Politicians were to blame.
• Without one particular event, Japan would still be number one.

Such stories feel better because they spare us from examining our own decisions and our failure to adapt when the world changed.

But they do not help us move forward.

I have spent many years in the IT industry. Whenever a project falls apart, I hear the same explanations: “The client was at fault.” “The previous manager caused this.” “The vendor failed us.”

Sometimes those accusations are entirely justified.

But teams that end the discussion there have a remarkable tendency to repeat the same failure.

Reflection is painful. Blaming someone else is easier. That impulse is part of being human, and perhaps nations are no different.

That is precisely why it is dangerous for Japan to stop thinking after saying, “America obstructed us decades ago.”

History Should Help Us Find Another Move

We do not study history to reassure ourselves that none of our failures were our fault.

We study it to ask why we lost and whether another move was available under the same conditions.

As Chinese AI companies become more visible, Japan should not spend most of its energy debating who caused it to fall behind.

The important question is much simpler:

What will Japan build next?

Yet whenever a new technology appears, the story that seems to attract the most attention in Japan is still, “We used to be the best in the world.”

Japan has experienced more than three decades of weak growth and industrial stagnation since its asset bubble collapsed in the early 1990s. If stories about the past remain more compelling than plans for the future, perhaps it is not surprising that the country has struggled for so long to regain momentum.