ORIGINAL: fcooke
Thanks - never had seen or heard that before......if only they had zimmerit.
Here is something you may not believe.
Prior to the end of WW2, the Japanese did not even have the concept of an "assembly line", as we take for granted nowadays.
The Japanese "zero" for example was produced in maybe 20 different shops or even barns, being carted around often on a horse drawn cart, and some of the stops were just a guy and his wife who might place a set number of bolts and nuts onto an assembly, then off to the next stop.
Of course you can see how long it might take to assemble things this way.
The Japanese did not have the resources for Zimmerit, or other things seen in Europe.
(Nazi Germany was using television in the thirties to broadcast their propaganda! They were called "Fernsehen".
After WW2, America sent production experts to Japan and helped them get factories going again and showed them how to operate assembly lines.
The Japanese clung to "quality control" of those lines and to this day their autos (like Toyota) seldom show rust, whereas U.S. autos earned the nickname of "rustbuckets" by the mid-sixties.
During the Korean War, my dad visited a Japanese town which renamed itself "Usa", and they explained proudly they had changed the name intentionally so they could stamp "Made in USA" on their goods.
This was at a time when U.S. goods were still considered the world standard on many of it's products.