I've lived in Japan for many years and its essentially a western nation with a stronger social conformity / shame culture. The sheer volume of Japan praise on HN is confusing to say the least.
I haven't lived in Japan but I've spent a considerable amount of time there. I accept that Japanese people are much more socially conformist, but it's interesting from a visitor's perspective as I've always felt the cities there feel a lot less homogenised in a lot of ways. Tokyo has always felt far more of a city of people doing interesting and creative things than London, to me at least.
One wrong move and you, your family, and your employer are trending on twitter and national news and apologizing for your entire existence while everyone publicly announces that they're cutting ties with you.
Japan has incredibly strong defamation laws, where half the stuff that hits twitter in the US would land people in trouble in court in Japan for trying to ruin someone's reputation (even if it's justified).
I argued with a colleague who worked for a japanese import/export company, he said they were crude, dumb and sleazy.. mostly succeeding by hiring hard working foreigners. That's one viewpoint, but I've also seen documentaries about early semiconductor industry in japan, and while they lifted a few patents, they did do their own share of hard work to turn them into workable devices (to the point where Japan became a reputable country in the field, from audio to computing).
Same goes for animation, Akira was a masterpiece of detail. The gaming industry was great. Ancestral toolsmith (famous katana blacksmith process).. samurai code.
More recently the manufacturing paradigm (toyota/lean).
There's a lot to love from there.
HN people are filled with Westerners fascinated by Asian culture, and then get disappointed once they realized that Asia being Asia and do not want to have the West problems by introducing diversity and PC talk.