The lesson is not that Japan is behind.

It is that access and capability are different things, and the second does not follow from the first. Management literature found the same thing from a different direction: studying multinational product design, Amos Winter and Vijay Govindarajan found that the constraints of developing countries usually force technological breakthroughs that teams designing from comfort rarely find. Their example was a wheelchair built for rural roads and a five-dollar repair budget, which beat its Western counterpart and was later sold back into the markets that had assumed innovation only flowed outward.

The pairing does more for the argument than a fifth case study would have. Put the two countries on the same chart and the dotted line everyone assumes has no country on it.