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  • 2000-09-25 (xsd:date)
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  • Was a Town in Japan Renamed 'Usa' So Its Products Could Be Labeled 'Made in USA'? (en)
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  • In the years after World War II, Japan, whose manufacturing capabilities had been almost completely wiped out by Allied bombing, attempted to rebuild both their economy and their industrial base by producing large quantities of inexpensive goods and exporting them to America and other countries. (The USA was the primary market, however, since it emerged from the war with a robust economy and had no damaged infrastructure to rebuild.) The phrase Made in Japan came to symbolize cheap, shoddy goods to Americans, and eventually the rumor arose that Japan had sought to avoid this stigma by deviously renaming one of its towns Usa so it could identify its products as being Made in USA. This rumor was almost certainly a tongue-in-cheek joke inspired by someone's noticing the coincidence of a town in Japan named Usa (and perhaps fueled by American xenophobia or lingering resentment of the Japanese). In fact, the Japanese city of Usa (on the island of Kyushu) was not created by renaming an existing town; it was called Usa long before World War II. As well, nearly every country that imports goods requires them to be marked with the name of their country of origin, not a town or city, and it would have taken some circuitous (and probably expensive) routing to get goods marked Made in USA into other countries without anyone's noticing that they had originated in Japan. America, especially, Japan's largest market by far, would certainly have noticed the incongruity of goods marked Made in USA being imported into the USA. Of course, the idea that the U.S. Customs Department would simply shrug at Japanese products marked Made in USA, despite the confusion they would obviously cause, simply because they were legitimately identified as coming from the Japanese city of Usa is just silly. Lest anyone think that U.S. Customs inspectors were lax about enforcing the rules or willing to look the other way, consider the following difficulty Sony experienced with them as late as 1969 when Sony tried to downplay the fact that its products were Japanese in origin: A notable exception to the USA's import laws is the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, which is allowed to use the Made in USA label on their products and export them to the USA duty-free. Legislation was introduced in Congress to close this loophole (also known as the Saipan Scam) in 1999, but it died in committee. (en)
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