"Made in Japan" implied quality, not dreck, pretty early. Keep in mind that the Nikon S2 camera, an homage to the German rangefinder cameras like Leica made in the 1950s, was an excellent camera.
Although...the Japanese automobiles were pretty marginal into the late 1960s. They did a lot of copying of engines and design features from other countries. I vividly remember driving a late 60s Toyota Corona (what I think of as the Norelco Razor Design period at Toyota - google 1968 Toyota Corona if you're too young to remember them) from Michigan to California, and the two-speed automatic was a disaster on any hill steeper than what you find in Kansas; the motor was too weak for top gear, and screaming in the lower gear. I'm not sure what, exactly, happened in the 1970s that led to the tremendous advances the major Japanese automakers made, but, by the late 70s, their automotive engineers were some of the best in the world.
