I think countries mostly fall into one of two baskets:
* those who normally favor their own country's products.
* those who almost universally loathe their own country's products.
I was born in one of the latter types of countries. Where I am from, the word "imported" was absolutely synonym with "better quality". It didn't even matter where it came from, as long as it was not local. This was due to 1970's and 80's protectionist/socialist policies which wanted to make the national industry protected from foreign competition - which it did, but had the side effect of making such industries completely non-competitive with the rest of the world.
Then I moved to a country in the more nationalist group: Australia. The "Australian Made"[1] logo is proudly used by anyone who produces even a tiny bit of their products in Australia (I think there's a minimal threshold for that to be allowed, but didn't really check it)! The most popular car there was the Holden Commodore for decades (recently, Holden closed down production in Australia - so now it's all Toyota), proudly Australian made - even if the mother company, GM, was not Aussie. After traveling around in a few countries, I came to the conclusion that most countries that actually have a competitive industry tend to be more like that. Japan is of course in that category, but so are most developed nations: USA, Canada, Sweden, Germany, Italy, even more recent "arrivals" to the upper league, like South Korea.
Poorer countries tend to be in a paradoxical position where their people will swear they love their nation and will be extremely irritated if any foreigner dares to criticize them, but in private they consider their own industry a joke, will go to great lengths to buy "imported" products, even if they're more expensive (given the high tariffs for imports), have almost zero trust in their compatriots (specially politicians and business people) and totally expect them to be dishonest without further evidence to the contrary, and so on... things that just lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Anyway, I just wanted to say that this is not at all particular to Japanese people :).