Well, more specifically, it turns out that Japan's robotics industry isn't well-suited to disaster recovery robots, and Japan was too proud to accept offers from foreign robotics companies that did have more suited robots ("we're a rich country, we shouldn't need help from anybody else").

Where are you getting this from? Robots built by Toshiba have been able to remove some 1500 spent fuel rods from reactor 4 where the radiation is lower.

Reactor 3 has so much radiation I don't think any robot can work there without getting fried.