Mitsubishi also made lots of money when it sold its stake in Photonic Integration Research, an American optical-components maker, last year.

ECONOMIST: Japanese trading houses

One, called HERMES or less elegantly the Helicopter Remote Manipulation of External Slingloads has been produced by Advanced Optical Systems, an American firm, for the US Armed Forces.

ECONOMIST: Autonomous helicopters

They were only minor players in these erstwhile American-led industries in the 1980s but are now dominant in everything from optical fibers to smartphone components, not to mention virtually every serious manufacturing challenge in the aerospace industry.

FORBES: Who's Winning: The Japanese or the Koreans?

North American sales were impacted by certain project delays and a winding down of U.S. stimulus spending on optical cable in support of telecommunications infrastructure projects.

ENGADGET: Corning touts 1 billion Gorilla Glass devices: that's a lot of face-saving surfaces

Worse still, a privacy group called Privacy International has identified British, American, German and Israeli companies who are exporting spooky technologies like DPI hardware and equally sophisticated software products like "optical cyber solutions" that enable mass surveillance of large scale populations, to repressive regimes in the Middle East such as Yemen, Egypt, Syria and Iran.

CNN: Opinion: In the digital age, everyone is becoming a spook