PS -
This part of the wikipedia entry on Nissan describes the relationship they had with Austin of the UK to make cars under licence. What it doesn't mention is that the agreement also said that Austin engineers had a quality veto on parts being made by Nissan before they could be used in production models.
Unfortunately for the Japanese the British engineers still had bad feelings from the war and would make them jump through extra hoops - for example the Austin side would regularly reject parts the quality of which was way above what was going into UK made models at the same time.
A side theory, in additional to Toyota TQM, is that this pressure meant Japanese Nissan/Austins were much better made than the original UK ones. Which kind of worked against the UK industry when they came back with their own models later on.