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Comment by jstanley | Hacker News Reader

That is not the reason that Japanese people don't buy many American products.

The reason is that there are hardly any products made in America.

I don't buy many American products because whenever I've tried in the past, the quality, and customer service has been shoddy. Americans can't assemble things correctly, ship wrong or obviously defective products, fail to fill in customs forms properly, and then expect me to just shrug my shoulders and accept all that rather than acknowledging issues and trying to fix them.

I realise that my experience is limited to the handful of times I've tried to buy stuff from the US. Perhaps I've just been very unlucky, but frankly, the odds are against it.

Your comment just reminded me, I bought a circuit board from the US recently and some of the pins were not soldered properly, I had to fix it myself.

Rumour has it that Shanghai manufactured Teslas have better manufacturing quality than Fremont

It is. Japanese don't have the opportunity to buy most American products. You won't see them stocked or available apart from import stores where prices can be 2-3x the price they are in America due to import fees. Many items aren't even available there due to strict restrictions. Meanwhile America has been an open market for a long time.

My point isn't that American products aren't expensive to import into Japan (I don't know). My point is that even if they weren't expensive to import into Japan, what American products would you even import? Most stuff is not made in America in the first place.

There are plenty of food, household, and tool products we make.

Pretty much everything I buy, apart from computer tech, is from an American company.

That can be true, but that doesn't mean it was manufactured in America. More often it means it was either labeled, packaged or assembled in America. But the supply chain does not end where you buy a finished product.

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