> Gee, I thought Eclipses were made in Bloomington/Normal, Illinois...
> When did they start making them in Japan and importing them?

I had an Eclipse when they first came out in the very late 80s. It was
considered a foreign car, and a sticker or data plate affixed to it
somewhere listed its port of entry as the bustling wharves of Normal,
Illinois.

The maker was then Diamond-Star Motors, a joint venture with Chrysler
(the Plymouth Laser and Eagle Talon came out of the same factory).
Chrysler had already had various parts-supplying and badge-engineering
relationships with Mitsubishi going back into the late 70s. Then it
was solely Mitsubishi for a while. A few years ago Daimler Chrysler
bought into it again. It's now Mitsubishi Motors North America,
Manufacturing Division. See for instance
http://www.mitsubishimotors.com/comp..._division.html

Around the same time, if memory serves, newspapers reported that a Ford
Crown Victoria, the very picture of the traditional American sedan, had
something like 70% imported content, just under some threshold for
being considered a domestic. The point of the story being that the
nascent trend of globalization was introducing a lot of bureaucratic
arcana and outright weirdness into once intuitive distinctions like
foreign vs. domestic cars.

Cheers,
--Joe