I agree with Ronnie. It sounds like the center section was installed upside down, giving you three speeds in reverse motion and 1 fwd. Try pushing in high gear to verify this.
At the conclusion of WWII, the US occupied Japan and started importing Japanese goods to kick start Japan's economy. Most of the imported stuff was plain junk, the materials used to make metal parts was soft and weak. The joke was that if you scratched the paint off of a Japanese product it...