You didn't read the article well and you didn't look up any info on patents whatsoever before jumping to "Why are you lying...?". You have a TON of unknown unknowns about the topic and it's actually impossible to explain it all while I'm on the toilet (which is where you're receiving this information from), but here's another few relevant tidbits:

The US patent office will help sustain foreign patents with a few requirements based on a few treaties, one of which is that the foreign patent was filed less than a year prior. Because the USPTO ostensibly exists to protect art made by artists, you can file an application for a patent within a year of filing a similar application in a different country. These were not recent enough. Another route is to apply for many countries at once through the patent cooperation treaty, which nintendo also did not do.

The person I was responding to was acting like the Japanese dates were a "gotcha" to the article. The article correctly states the US patent dates and links them, the related JP patents happen to be on the same page (but you have to click off of it to go there), and they have different application dates listed than the ones detailed in the article. It's literally not the patents being talked about in the article. In fact, the article goes into detail about the timing and how it's being used in the case: nintendo is seeking injunction money based on the time their patent was active in the US up to the time the suit was filed. You and the other poster are having a critical lack of information error, and a lot of that info is in the article. You confused yourself reading a site you don't understand outside the article.

The patent system sucks ass and exists almost wholly to protect megacorporations at this point. Copyright, likewise, has fallen into a state of disarray as we continue to write laws that are impossible to enforce for the individual without an entire legal team to guide them. While I personally think the whole system needs a rework, we are probably a long way as a society (societies, really) from identifying the problem or making meaningful change. In the meantime, learning how (and why) corporations "punch down" like this legally is our only option. Here's hoping this case does not go to a jury; I basically only see uninformed schlock from general discussion about patents and absolutely no initiative to learn about the patent system. It is almost never used to protect the creation of an individual and the public does not understand that was the original intent.