"Made in Japan", good or bad?
 

What do you think when you see "Made in Japan"? Is it a sign of quality, or something else? Have you driven a Toyota lately? Play online games with Sony and gambling with your identity (and eternal soul)? Eaten any raw beef in Japanese restaurants and actually survived? Have you sat on a porch lately, listening to crickets while drinking Shizuoka green tea in the warm light of it's Cherenkov radiation?

Yeah, ok, that last part was scientifically bullshit, but you get my drift. Japanese economy is not so much as being overtaken by China and India, but actually sinking. Tourism wasn't so hot even before tsunami and Fukushima. Even Japanese companies are shying away from domestic subcontractors for electronics, metalworks and optics (that I'm aware of). I hear constant complains that engineering skills are falling as old engineers won't guide younger ones in fear for their jobs, but at the same time cannot follow technical advancements due to laziness and lack of fresh skills including English.

All this is bound to show on the quality of products. Have you noticed it? Do you buy because it's "Made in Japan", or do you leave it in the shelves for the same reason?

Lately, to me, it's a rarity, as many products that used to be Made in Japan are now Made in Singapore, China, Vietnam, etc....

The only thing I still value as good quality I use every day is my Citizen Eco-Drive Skyhawk.... It works great and it looks awesome....

As far as all the other jazz, well, everyone seems to go for the cheapest manufacturing possible. We sell extension cords from the Philippines, DeWalt power tools from China.... Quality has gone down, but we all seem to live in disposable societies. How else would the economies continue to run if things lasted for a decade or more?

definition
 

For me the answer is simple :

Made in Japan = Perfect Quality.
Made in China = Cheap Counterfeit

I think made in Japan is probably fine! They still make more than Britain!

At the very least, it`s a sign that it`s better quality that most of the other options. Certainly better than "Made in China".

I even bought one after the uproar in the US... Which, to be quite honest, I still doubt to be anything other than an unfortunate mat-slip incident followed by a LOT of people trying to cash in.

Sony has never been "quality". Quite the opposite of it, really. They`ve been using cheap outsourced parts for years - there is very little that is "made" by Sony, and a lot that is "cast off parts from other makers that is assembled by Sony". It was no surprise that they screwed up even more.

Regularly, in fact. ;D

No, but I would LOVE to so a photo of someone else doing so. :)

When it comes to optics, Japan has always held foreign... German, I think? Optics as higher quality than Japanese. This is a weird wall for Japanese companies involved in optics. It has been shown that Japanese producers can make equal quality faster and for a lower cost - but still companies will choose European. I believe that there is a belief in the industry that as Japanese optics are not all that well known, being able to say that the optics were made in Germany instills a further confidence in the customer. This is a spiral of sorts, which leads to people assuming that if the Japanese companies aren`t choosing the optics from their own country there must be something wrong with them (or at the very least, the others are of higher quality if even the Japanese are choosing them) so there is little hope for the companies that do have excellent quality...
Branding - it`s power is amazing.

What is the other option?
That is the big question.
I most certainly am not going to avoid Japanese made products... And in most cases I don`t think there is even a decent option if I did. Even if Japanese quality falls, it isn`t as if it is going to be worse than "Made in China".

Haven't noticed any difference at all. Other than the increasing rarity.

I don't understand what this is. That's like blaming the oven for hormones in your chicken.

While I don`t get the eternal soul bit, it actually makes really good sense to blame Sony.

They decided to "reduce costs" by completely removing the security team from their online service - leaving one poor non-specialist to come in every few days or when there was a problem.

That is unbelievable with a company the size of Sony. Security for personal details and credit card info should have been pretty high on the scale of importance.

It`s a bit more like living in a sketchy neighborhood, leaving your doors not only unlocked but wide open... And walking away for days at a time. Yes, the people who came in are in the wrong, but you could have at least locked the door.

But the people who run the online service in the US are not the same people who build the machines. I thought this was about "Made in Japan".

The customer data service is run in Japan, by Sony. This is why users worldwide were hit. The actual in-country play servers didn`t have a problem. It was where they stored customer information - in Japan.

The hackers may have figured out how to access the information by messing with local bits of the network, but the actual hacking was done to the server in Japan. The server where they didn`t bother with much of any security.