And yet without the Japanese gaming industry, video games as we know them today would be vastly different:

• Without the NES and Super Mario Bros., the console market would've remained dead
• Without Street Fighter II, fighting games would've never taken off
• Without Virtua Fighter, the shift to 3D would've never happened
• Without Super Metroid, games would've remained linear affairs and exploration in games would've been nothing
• Without Resident Evil, survival horror games and zombie media in general wouldn't have gotten so popular during the 2000s
• Without Parappa the Rapper, there wouldn't even be such a thing as a rhythm game
• Without Final Fantasy VII, RPGs in the west would've remained a PC thing and the PSX wouldn't have made Sony the biggest rival of Nintendo
• Without Metal Gear Solid, cinematic narratives in video games would've been laughed off by everyone else
• Without The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, there wouldn't have been open world games like Grand Theft Auto III (and the Houser brothers both admitted this)
• Without Ape Escape, dual analogue sticks would've never become the standard for game controllers
• Without Shenmue, the idea of adding "realistic elements" to games such as day and night cycles would've one people would laugh at
• Without Super Smash Bros. Melee, platform fighters would've otherwise been a niche subgenre of fighting games as a whole
• Without Resident Evil 4, the third-person shooter genre would've never exploded the way it did afterwards
• Without Wii Sports, motion controls and gyro would've never become such a mainstream thing
• Without Demon's Souls, pretty much no one would have the balls to make anything resembling a Soulslike game in presentation and difficulty

I could go on and on, but it's rich as fuck for western game developers and media to despise the Japanese side of the industry so much when they laid the foundations for just about everything being done right now in the game industry.