There's a book about this, Occidentalism by Ian Burma and Avishai Margalit. The basic idea is that it was German romanticists from the 18th century who argued that industrialization had divorced modern people from hard work and etc that started it off and then cross-cultural polinization spread it to Japan and so forth

Here's a mixed review of the book by Martin Jacques, he views the book as a bit too pro-west

As to its persistency, narratives are surprising hard to get rid of, surely the holocaust should have killed off the claim that Jews run the world but it didn't, Japan's sucess on its own against Russia didn't take out orientalism etc