I could see how that viewpoint seems valid from the perspective of a Japanese engineer. But those of us from America know that our government is far too incompetent to pull off something like this intentionally. The far more believable (and frankly, more American) response is that we created a bunch of hysteria and outrage over nothing. As this article shows, we have done this with our domestic car manufacturers as well (though I'm surprised nobody else commented that this was a Malcolm Gladwell article).

Furthermore, I'm not sure there's a whole lot of difference between domestic and foreign auto manufacturers at this point. The domestic auto companies still build parts overseas, and the foreign manufacturers still do manufacturing in the US. Also, large parts of domestically manufactured autos are either licensed or purchased directly from Japanese auto companies -- so a recall of a faulty part in a Japanese car would likely lead to recalls of American cars that use the same part. This was the case with the Honda airbag recall -- Chrysler used a lot of Honda-made airbags in its cars, and had to recall them as a result.