>>813437I think that Northern European Protestants, and the Angloids especially, have had a long standing cultural obsession with Japan because traditional Japanese art and architecture reflected their own values of "beauty in simplicity" along with their own culture of "stiff upper lip" politeness. In fact, a bunch of Western minimalist artstyles were directly inspired by things like Japanese woodblock printing.
I think "Thing, Japan" is ultimately just the latest expression of this. It ultimately stems from a feeling that the Japanese way of doing things is how *we* would be doing things if we were supposedly doing them the *right* way (even if the reality is that we're not really all that different.)