Japanese firms could sell to the U.S., but Silicon Valley struggled to win market share in Japan. Until 1974, Japan imposed quotas limiting the number of chips U.S. firms could sell there. Even after these quotas were lifted, Japanese companies still bought few chips from Silicon Valley, even though Japan consumed a quarter of the world’s semiconductors, which companies like Sony plugged into TVs and VCRs that were sold worldwide. Some big Japanese chip consumers such as NTT, Japan’s national telecom monopoly, bought almost exclusively from Japanese suppliers. This was ostensibly a
