It's possible, I guess. Dunno.

Anyway, the link still takes you to the correct vomitus maximus.

 

Actually, that's a bit of a misnomer. Not everything manufactured in Japan in the late '50s and '60s had the reputation for being "cheap junk." They did export a lot of cheap goods, it's true, often dime-store plastic toys and such, which significantly marred their reputation.

But some of their higher quality products were already coming to our shores, and quickly gaining a reputation for being of very high quality indeed, like in the below example >>




Remember, too, that the Japanese battleship Yamato was the most powerful warship constructed during the Second World War. She was the largest, heaviest battleship ever constructed, weighing 72,802 tons at full load. She carried nine 460 mm (18.1 inch) guns, the largest guns ever fitted to any warship.

The point being that Japanese industry was quite capable of building very high quality machines back to the early part of the 20th century, but that most of it wasn't exported until the post-war, MIOJ period.

 

Just wait. Chinese auto quality needs to improve BEFORE selling here. Just wait. Wasn't the Yamato sunk by the US Navy before she did any signifucant damage?

 

She was. And the Bismark was eventually sunk by the Royal Navy, too.

Yamato was destroyed almost at the end of the war before she could be pressed into any sort of lengthy service - at this point Japan was already beginning to lose overall, so one ship wasn't going to save them.

I guess I was speaking of technological prowess, not who ultimately triumphed in various battles.

Interestingly, Yamato was more sophisticated than Bismark, and Bismark was hailed as a technological tour de force.

 

At the time it was, but tech advances rapidly in wartime. Interestingly, although smaller and less powerful, the better radar, rangefinders, and speed of the American South Dakota and Iowa classes made them more technologically advanced than either.