Western views of Japanese culture have for centuries been focused on the flashy, the cool, the exotic and different. Most of Japan is not Tokyo, most of Tokyo is not Akihabara. There is a part of Japan with Helly Kitty stores and great neon arcades like something out of a movie; and in the United States there is Epcot Center and the Las Vegas strip. The parts of Japan and Japanese culture which tend to get the most focus in foreign media are not necessarily the most representative parts, any more than any Hollywood film is representative of the US or any Guy Ritchie movie is representative of the United Kingdom.

This has been the way of things for a quite long time. When Gilbert & Sullivan created The Mikado (1885), it was part of a popular trend focusing on a Japanese society which even at the time was undergoing rapid change. In the 19th century Japan's ports were forcibly opened to trade, and the influx of Japanese goods and reports of life in urban Edo sparked the imagination of Europe and the Americas. The Japonisme style in Europe included a focus on erotic ukiyo-e woodcuts and the pillow-books produced for sale to European sailors, The Nightless City (1899) focused not on Japan's history or country life, but the brothel district of Yoshiwara.

That was a Japan already fading or gone; the Meiji Restoration in 1868 heralded sweeping social and economic reforms, which would continue through the years of war until the new constitution, put into place through American military victory and adopted in 1947. View on Japan shifted rapidly from the late 19th century through the end of World War II, with the increasing military power lending credence to the prejudice of the "Yellow Peril" in Western eyes.

Post-war, Japan was no longer a military threat. Cultural exports shifted, and with it the views of Japan. Gojira (ゴジラ, 1954) ushered in the era of kaiju films, post-war manga and anime catered to new markets, with censorship restrictions leading to some notable differences from European and American productions. These were not necessarily exemplary of the bulk of material produced for domestic Japanese consumers, but oddities like tentacle erotica that found a home on Blockbuster video shelves in the 1980s produced outsized influence on what the Japanese were into, at least in the minds of Western fan-culture.

It has to be remembered that for the most part, this was not illustrative of Japanese culture as a whole. Contemporary Japan is not all Tokyo, anymore than all of the US is New York City, or all of the United Kingdom is London, or all of Mexico is Mexico City, or all of France is Paris...etc. etc. Much of Japan is still rather rural, most of the inhabitants are not otaku. It is a truism, however, that there has been a strong trend to exoticize Eastern nations like Japan in Western culture, making them out to be stranger and more different (and sometimes more perverted) than they actually are...or ever were.