It's more or less been that way since the colonial powers first encountered Japan. European powers found Japan to be something of an outlier to other East Asian

It's more or less been that way since the colonial powers first encountered Japan. European powers found Japan to be something of an outlier to other East Asian territories. Many early European accounts of Japan found the social order fascinating and often regarded as comparable with their home countries. Early British visitors wrote something like "Japan is one of the civilized nations of the world". These same powers had starkly different opinions on nearby Korea and China. Because of the Dutch port at Nagasaki, there was also a steady stream of Japanese goods into Europe and informed art, fashion, pottery, and other things. Europeans found analogs with their native stories of Kings and Knights, and the militarism of the colonial period was found and reflected by the Shogunate and Meiji governments. As Japan opened up, Europe found a country that had long been absorbing Western ideas in technology and medicine, but with an entirely different philosophical worldview -- challenging European cultural centrism that Western culture was the secret to its relative global power. By the mid 1800s Europe was so full of Japanese cultural influence that terms like "Japonism" were formed to reflect daily fashion trends that people wore on the street, and decorated their houses with. Van Gogh famously went through a period attempting to mimic Japanese art he found in news print and posters used to wrap pottery shipped from Japan. https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/stories/inspiration-from-japan https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/stories/inspiration-from-jap... At this point the West has a few hundred years of this kind of connection and reflection with Japan, and to be fully honest, Japan kind of finds the West as interesting as well. On a similar note, this cross cultural infatuation bothers my Korean wife to no end. But I have to remind her that we've really been dealing with her people en masse for under a hundred years, while we've been trading, teaching, learning, and fighting the Japanese for almost half of a millenia. It doesn't make her any happier ;)