The Japanese were pressured into signing international patent and copyright agreements, but they ignored them. ‘That [the agreements] posed no effective obstacle to Japanese copying of foreign designs,’ wrote the Japan historian William Lockwood, ‘was a constant complaint of manufacturers abroad.’ ... Less frequently, foreign technology was copied and cleverly upgraded, as with the Toyoda automatic loom, which was sold back to the home of modern textiles, Britain.

The capacity to export told politicians in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan what worked and what didn’t and they responded accordingly. ... But this term does not describe what happened in successful developing states in east Asia. In Japan, Korea, Taiwan and China, the state did not so much pick winners as weed out losers.