These would not have been made if those economies had been following market signals. For whatever reason, the successful economies that do follow those signals seem to be either Western or based on a Western model. The individualism that is encouraged in the Western tradition, especially in American culture, and the Western values of questioning authority and thinking outside the box are a very helpful source of innovation. That's especially true at time like the 1990s, when what's happening is a real change in the basic paradigm of economic activity, making production processes far more information technology-based than in the past. It seemed so good for so long.
Japan is known for a norm-based factory management system.
In a way that is very good when you have an established technology, such as automobiles in the '50s and '60s, where the productivity gains lie not in a dramatic change or innovation in the underlying technologies, but a tweaking of the social system that uses an existing, fairly mature technology to produce a final product. The Japanese were really excellent at that. The Japanese were able to double or triple labor productivity in the space of five or six years by applying techniques based on an understanding that firms behaved like social organizations, and that workers and managers were bound to each other. Managers tend to devolve more responsibility to workers in a trust-based system like that and get more rapid information feedback that leaves them closer to the production process. This happened first in Toyota, and when those techniques were imported to Detroit, the American auto industry also saw that kind of increase in labor productivity.