ABSTRACT
The chapter discusses the Japan's developmental system, showing how it treated foreign technology, favoring diffusion over development, and use over creation. It explores the Japan's intellectual property system within the context of the developmental model, emphasizing with examples how it operated to advantage domestic producers. Japan's patent system is used as a reasonable proxy for the overall system of intellectual property protection, since it is a piece of the system that dealt most directly with the relevant technologies of the past few decades. Japan's system of intellectual property protection is typically treated as a trade barrier in recent official US evaluations, on the ground that large Japanese firms successfully orchestrate the system to extract proprietary technology from US competitors. Japan is a developmental economy, a state systematically committed in its business-government interactions to rapid economic growth. Japan has had extraordinary success at achieving technological parity with the United States in a remarkably short time.
