I originally posted this in /r/japan but was advised to try here for better answers

This is a quote from the paper "The Japanese Nation: An Imagined Community" by Paul Doyon I found on www.academia.edu (registration required)

He mainly talks about nihonjinron and the emergence of the Japanese nation-state, but he also made this interesting point:

One presumably essentialist trait that the Japanese have been deemed to possess is one of workaholism. Kato Tetsuro, in his paper "Workaholism: It's Not in the Blood" provides evidence against this and the nihonjinron theory by using Linhart's (1988) study on Japanese leisure habits:

To Western observers in the Meiji Period, the best adjective to describe Japanese workers was not "diligent" but "lazy." In the Journal of Japanese Studies (Vol. 14, No. 2. 1988) Austrian born Japanologist Sepp Linhart has this to say: "To Western observers of the Meiji Period, the Japanese exhibited none of today's stereotypical characteristics of a diligent, hard-working people. Karl Scherzer, a member of the first Austro-Hungarian delegation to the Far East, wrote in his diary shortly after the Meiji Restoration that the Japanese seemed much more cheerful, pleasure-seeking, and given to drink and showed more aversion to work than the Chinese he had observed. (1995)

Is the Japanese image of workaholism and diligence a post-WWII phenomenon? Does anyone have any other sources on this topic? I'm pretty sure that in Japan it is widely believed that this has always been a feature of the national character, so I'd be really interested to hear more on this.