I'm not sure where you're getting your statistics from, Doc, but I will bump this fellow's ad up and say that I've owned and hunted with Ithaca-imported SKB's for over 40 years. I have friends who have done the same. All of our guns have been extremely reliable and built with high quality.
I was referring to the Ithaca imported guns as being of higher quality. I had a friend whose represented Ithaca when they were importing the SKB guns and he told me Ithaca would return 30% of the guns back to Japan for quality control issues.
No doubt the needed quality control issues were corrected and the shotguns shipped back to Ithaca for distribution.
Doc