They might have trolled or basically showing off superior production process.
Second hand knowledge, but I was told they're detailed oriented because they basically don't trust anyone to tell them when they're wrong. The culture is so adverse to causing offense, that instead of reporting a mistake to a colleague, errors are sometimes allowed through and "engineered around" at the next point of assembly.
There were a lot of nuances to how this sometimes became self correcting and sometimes caused project failure, but as far as I can tell, that applies to everything Japan.
Firsthand sidenote: A similar cultural thing is being ashamed at anything less than proficiency, and will "pretend" to have no knowledge of a topic if they're not an expert. For instance, most people will claim to not understand English, because they're not fluent. But make no mistake, they understand 95% of what you're saying.
Low error rates in their own output means that they understand industry processes very well.
Although the American and Japanese factories were manufacturing the transmissions to the exact same spec, customers were specifically requesting the Japanese transmission. Investigations revealed that while the American transmissions met the spec, the Japanese ones exceeded it by a significant margin.
http://www.jimleonardpi.com/default/assets/File/Blog%20-%20W...
Except for stories about total engineering fail or borderline fraud, nowadays I couldn't imagine any stories being told about about manufacturing in Germany, US or China.
They did go to great lengths to clone though, but that was a "we can do exactly what you can in two years from essentially nothing" international politics dick measuring contest. Anything other than an exact clone would lead to a "look at how the commies can only make an inferior clone" talking point.
Though who am I kidding, no one probably evaluates production like that. Though I imagine chip makers are pretty serious about that kind of stuff.