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For one, Germany was a pioneer in optics and camera tech prior to the wars. Japan was not, but they had a idea of taking the formulations that the Germans had innovated and figuring out the most efficient way of making them into products on industrial scale. Both countries were essentially leveled during the war which made them fertile ground for building completely brand spanking new cutting edge factories and infrastructure, investors were stumbling over each other dumping money into the German and Japanese industrial renaissance. American and British factories had no way to compete and were drained of investor money with which to innovate and upgrade. Germans were eventually sidelined because they couldn't make their wild new innovation the SLR cheap and reliable enough on industrial scale before the Japanese did and promptly swept the market. By the AF era nobody had any hope of matching the Jap stranglehold on the industry.
