For reasons I don't understand entirely, Japanese pull saws never experienced the massive decline in quality all Stanley products (and those of their competitors) experienced after WWII. As a result even inexpensive pull saws tend to be at least mediocre and sometimes quite good. The best are (as far as I can tell) still reckoned to be the hand made variety, which coexist peacefully with their modern, stamped, cousins. For this reason they nearly displaced the western saw in North America.
The definitive history of the decline and rise in tool manufacturing has yet to be written, but I certainly think the widespread adoption of modern stick framing practices in conjunction with portable power tools has led directly to a sharp decline in the skill of a modern carpenter. The looks I get when I sharpen a chisel acceptably are really surprising to me, and my grandfather worked as a finish carpenter after WWII and considered these skills important. For some reason hand skills in professional carpenters never seems to have experienced this sharp decline in Japan.
It might just be that a pull saw is simpler to mass produce well, since it lends itself well to stamping - it mainly needs tensile strength, which I think is much easier than compressive rigidity.
That is true, but the teeth in a Japanese crosscut saw are very delicate and fiddly and there's lots of room to screw them up if you don't care about the product. And yet (with some exceptions) they actually seem to come sharp from the factory, something that is still a novelty in Western tools. They're not all good--I have a modern pruning saw that is particularly crudely made--but they're startlingly high quality in an era that has seen near total collapse of, say, chisel manufacturing[1]. I suspect the tendency toward impulse hardening the teeth made it vitally important that the teeth actually be ready to use, because it would take a diamond file and some real patience to sharpen them after hardening, but I really don't know.
[1] A chisel is a bar of metal with a wedge at the tip and a handle. You'd think it would be pretty hard to screw up, but you underestimate the ingenuity of idiots. From using the wrong steel, to forging it wrong, to hardening it wrong, to grinding it wrong, to putting the handle on crooked, any and sometimes all of these have been spotted in the wild. I would no more use a department store chisel for woodworking than I would use a screwdriver as a drill.
That is pretty shocking that you could mess up a chisel... that seems like something people could figure out a single good design for and repeat for eternity.
The definitive history of the decline and rise in tool manufacturing has yet to be written, but I certainly think the widespread adoption of modern stick framing practices in conjunction with portable power tools has led directly to a sharp decline in the skill of a modern carpenter. The looks I get when I sharpen a chisel acceptably are really surprising to me, and my grandfather worked as a finish carpenter after WWII and considered these skills important. For some reason hand skills in professional carpenters never seems to have experienced this sharp decline in Japan.