I think that's utter crap. Any nation is capable of building a well built, reliable, quality car. How Subaru, Hyundai, Cadillac, Buick, and Porsche have been climbing the quality ladder and in more than a few cases beating the Japanese Big 3 is proof of this. That Mazda, Isuzu, Mitsubishi, Suzuki and other Japanese automakers so completely fail to live up to your statement above is another reason it's not true.

Toyota, Honda, and Nissan (Nissan less so recently) have defined their purpose as high quality, meticulously assembled cars. That was their rason d'être. Now as other automakers focus more they're catching up, and in some cases beating the Japanese 3. Moreover, as the Japanese realize this, they're trying to focus on style, power, putting emotion back into the car, leading to quality stagnation and gaffes. (the most recent example - the shoddy interior quality of the new Toyota Avalon)

Buying Japanese for Japanese quality? Acura regularly loses to Honda in quality surveys, despite a larger percentage of Acura cars being built in Japan. Sure, as a luxury marque, people expect more. But clearly there's not a significant quality jump from being Japanese built to offset the higher expectations. People often cite Lexus' being exclusively built in Japan - which in the past was true. But Toyota also mandated an even greater level of quality control with Lexus than with Toyota cars - one would argue that it was the process, not the workers, that made the biggest difference there. And Toyota is clearly confident enough with their US workforce because they're going to start building Lexuses in the US soon (if they haven't already started).

Now, I'm not saying your relative in Japan is wrong, but there are flaws in his argument and sweeping overgeneralizations like that about Japanese and US society are just asking to be picked apart.

And I'll add that I am aware Subaru is a Japanese brand. But for a brand that used to be down the Japanese automotive quality craphole, it's really stepped up.