Cerowyn
What on earth ?..
UK bikes are Brits(or unreliable old crap when you’ve blown a few of 'em up)
Japanese bikes are Japs,(not to be mistaken for the bikes of that name used extensively in speedway racing) or rice burners, or UJM’s(Universal Japanese Motorcycle - which describes the tendency of Jap bikes to be four cylinder o/h cam, twin shockers, etc which they all seemed to be at one point - and is now used as a term of endearment and some respect)
As for built in obsolescence, well what would you call bikes whose cams run in pail all drillings whose only support is the oil film ?
Those bikes from the big four were notorious for being only good for 50 to 60 k(excepting the Suzuki GS series) if you were lucky, and then the cost of spares was so great, plus advances in machine design, meant they were not worth repairing.
If it wasn’t the top ends failing, then it was the finish that wasn’t up to a good British winter, and they had a tendency to wear out all the expensive bits at once, such as fork stanchions, chassis bearings, suspension, gearbox, clutch bearings …yadda yadda yadda…
Now you can call that ignorant if you wish, but fact is, I know enough about bikes to know when it has been designed for a certain lifetime, I can and have rebuilt them, two-strokes mainly.
I think you are going overboard with the PC thing, what would you like me to say?
"Bikes that are made by companies whose headquarters are based in Japan but which themselves may be made all over the world ? "
Is that good enough ?
Jap bike is a useful term, it is not derogatory, it does not describe a people it applies to a product manufactured by certain companies, nothing else.
Harleys may be hopeless handlers, terrible brakes etc, but they can be rebuilt at reasonable cost almost forever, and many big repairs can be done without too much specialised stuff.
Brit bikes, at least the old ones, need rebuilds usually around 20k but again it is fairly easy, and cheap.You have to ride them within their limits and then they are reliable enough, it’s just that those limits are a lot lower than Japanese machines.
There is no doubt that Jap bikes are now reliable in that you can expect a significant number of models to do over 100k, it was not always so, but they were always better than the Brits and the Euros, with a few exceptions.