Well explained Mike - and thank you.
I noticed on my last visit to Japan and that was decades ago, that younger people were desirous of copying America - their advertisements, their music, their baseball and at the time, a fastback mustang-like celica. Maybe many of them these days have also gone for automatic transmissions.
There used to be a saying in Italy, "Autos are for cripples."
In Australia, the trend went firstly towards > FWD > autos > Korean pricing > and who knows: maybe the Japanese trend of hybrids - which TG haven't caught on yet here - but, but, maybe after the demise of Falcons...