Why Japan didn’t create the iPod (2008)

No, but they did a Walkman, which broke ground. https://designmuseum.org/discover-design/all-design-objects/....

The version I had in like 1989 was metal, the size of a cassette, played 3 hours of music loudly on a single battery and had a nice set of in-ear headphones. $300 as I remember which was a lot but worth it. Sony lost the thread at some point after that, but for a while they were riding high on music and TV's.