> It's a running joke at this point, because Japanese cannot compromise quality to make costs reasonable.

As someone living in Japan, I don't buy this argument. There are plenty of shoddy Japanese products, number one being the houses (but I guess that is not something that you can export).

> I'm not going to bother getting into how Japanese are horrible with software too.

Here I fully agree. Anybody who has to suffer the software and web services made in here knows how bad it can be.