Only that it’s a fairly meaningless grouping. When japan first entered the car market in north america there might have been some commonality, but now what characteristics do they share that some american cars don’t have? They’re not even imported a lot of the time.
Given that, it does start to feel tinged with racism if someone insists on grouping things together that don’t really belong together.
As for Chinese LLMs, the term doesn’t “feel” pejorative to me - but i also don’t see a totally clear set of attributes they share. Not all are open-weight. Some are small and can be run on consumer hardware, some are huge. They even have a variety of answers to what happened june 3rd 1989
Typically the answer is "reliability", which is a positive trait, which makes the original callout about negative connotations very odd to me.
They're unique in that they even make a regular passenger car. American manufacturers only make SUVs and a couple of sports/luxury cars. They basically gave up because the Camry/Corolla/Accord/Civic ate their lunch.
The cheapest sedan you can get from an American brand is the Cadillac CT4.
The difference is quite big in my opinion. When given the option to pick a Japanese vs American vehicle for about the same price/features, most people will pick the Japanese vehicle. American vehicles have improved over the years, but quality and reliability are generally better for Japanese vehicles even today.
Better overall design?
The term seems to have the connotation of "competitive at 1/10 the price of Claude", so I don't see the problem.
It's not Harbor Freight Chinese (and heck even they have decent stuff sometimes now too).
You don't think people still talk about Japanese cars as a distinction in quality from US or European ones?
They return instructions for you to do something, and you or a script you permit chooses to execute what the model tells you and return the result to the model.