Japan tried to build an operating system for the world, the US intervened

Ken Sakamura’s 1984 TRON project defined a five-layer Japanese computing stack, creating its own CPU (Hitachi’s Gmicro/200), keyboard layout, and a real-time peripheral bus, while the BTRON desktop introduced a hypermedia document model and a 1.5 million-character encoding system. The BTRON variant was barred by a 1989 U.S. trade report, halting its deployment in schools, whereas the embedded ITRON branch became one of the most widely used operating systems worldwide.