I have lived long enough to remember people saying much the same about Japanese manufacturing as some are saying about Chinese today. My father insisted on buying a totally inferior German camera back in the early 1960s instead of the excellent Yashica I had requested on the advice of the photo shop that wouldn't touch Japanese products.
In fact I was in a major London photo retailer about 25 years ago when someone came in enquiring about Panasonic cameras and was told to try the hardware shop further down the road as proper photo shops don't handle that stuff. They did handle other Japanese brands by then, but not something that sounded like a vacuum cleaner. That shop has gone but Panasonic remain!
Times change
This is funny to me as well; people for years even argued the merits of the Nikon EDG as an "alpha" since it was produced in Japan as opposed to Germany. Funny how things change.