It's extra hilarious because outside of "I like your cartoons and video games" there's a sense of them looking down on Japanese culture. Sure, maybe some of the smarter ones will recognize them as their fellow global north bourgeoisie. But it seems like a lot of them, even the biggest weebs see them as still "inferior brown people", but can be second in command because they amuse the WASPs. Some older CHUDs seem to have this dynamic with Israel. They're bad because they're not Christian, but they have the honor of being second bananas to the white man because Israel's Islamophobia amuses them.

I always feel "I love Japan they're so efficient and clean" is some type of coded phrase for peeps that just want to live in a monoculture/monoethnic dystopia, as it has the same fash vibes as saying Mussolini made the trains run on time. Like we could have bullet trains and cleaner cities too, just take the police budgets and give them to sanitation workers and set up incentivized recycle bins like in Germany that give out coins for putting in bottles and such

Exactly. It's not an appreciation for a culture or a country. It's fetishisation they can project their own weird values onto.