Comment by tdeck
It is weird. I think it's kind of a leftover from the apex of the Japanese economy and all those Japanese business management books. We had a whole generation of managers putting samurai swords on their walls and talking about "open kimono" leadership and people got famous essentially promoting the idea that Japan is like nowhere else and fetishizing the country. So it kind of entered the zeitgeist.
There was never a corresponding image of Italy and almost nobody in the US was talking about South Korean society at all 15 years ago.
Businesses I've dealt with in the manufacturing world (so most American workers before the 'service economy' revolution) deal way more with Japanese companies than Italian. Also I think humans just need an ideal to aspire to. We don't respond well to 'it's all crap, always has been, always will be'. Foreign countries we like look better because we see what's better than where we are. There's a reason for the saying 'the grass is always greener (because from a distance you can't see it's full of dog crap)'.