Noah Smith:  Every once in a while, you hear the old claim that Japan doesn’t create new things, but simply copies the West and makes small, iterative improvements. Most Americans no longer believe this canard and a recent Pew survey found that 75 percent of Americans think of Japanese people as “inventive.” But people still repeat the old saw from time to time, and it needs to die.

First of all, if anyone ever asks you “What did the Japanese ever invent?” you can quote them a long and impressive list. In the area of electronics, for example, Japanese inventors came up with the digital single-lens reflex camera, the floppy disk, flash memory, the VCR, the portable calculator, the Walkman, the laptop computer, the DVD and more.

Now, defenders of the old stereotype will be quick to point out that many of these inventions used technologies that were invented in other countries — for example, the charge-coupled devices that make digital photography possible were pioneered in the U.S. But if you look at the history of innovation, you see that almost all innovation stands on the shoulders of giants.  The Japanese team that came up with blue LEDs, which enable energy-efficient lighting, was awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize in physics. Pluripotent stem cells, which allow the creation of stem cells without the destruction of human embryos, were invented by Japanese scientist Shinya Yamanaka, who received the 2012 Nobel in chemistry.

And in 1804, before the end of feudal times, a Japanese surgeon was the first to use general anesthesia.

In the fields of entertainment and culture, Japan is also a pioneer. Many of our modern video-game genres come from Japanese games.

That should take care of debunking the stereotype. But it’s also true that there are at least two important ways in which Japan could bolster its inventive and innovative prowess.

The first is to improve its universities. Japan’s top-ranked university, the University of Tokyo, is only No. 23 on the worldwide list, while U.S. universities dominate.

The second thing Japan could do — but which many of its citizens will be reluctant to countenance — is to create a well-funded equivalent of the U.S.’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.  DARPA has been responsible for a long list of transformative inventions and innovations, the Internet itself not least among them.

So Japan, which has always been a very creative, innovative country, is doing what it needs to do in order to maintain its inventive edge. Is the U.S. doing the same? It should be.