I find the Japanese to be an utter paradox to my Western mind.
I lived there as a military dependent in the Sixties.
I really liked Japan...it was complete and total culture shock...I moved there when I was nine, and it was like moving to another planet.
The sights...the sounds...the smell of a combination of sewage, diesel exhasust, and fish. The kids in large gaggles going to and from school with the uniforms and masks with hats and backpacks, the three wheeled trucks, the fake food in restaurant windows, the pachinko ball parlors, the clean, unfinished wooden house interiors with the rice paper panels, the toilets that were a porcelain hole in the floor..everything was so different.
I thought the people were wonderful. When we moved to the Philippines after that, I got my first real exposure to the other side of the Japanese. The Filipinos were treated harshly under Japanese occupation, and they had not forgotten.
Quite a dichotomy. I came to view them as people capable of appreciation of simplicity and beauty, but also capable of great brutality.
I guess that is true of all people, but those characteristics just seemed more tightly compressed in the Japanese to me, more of two completely opposite extremes coexisting in the same individual human. I did, and still have a great appreciation for them as a people.
One of my favorite stories about Western encounters with Japanese culture was the famous journey the USS Astoria made to Japan in 1939 carrying the ashes of the highly respected Japanese ambassador Hirosi Saito who had died while in the USA. (You can read about it here: The Saito Cruise 1939
US-Japanese relations were quite difficult at that time, but this was a special case.
IIRC, even though this was a diplomatic mission, there was a lot of military tension on both sides.
When they prepared to go ashore, Captain Turner selected the biggest, brawniest sailors he could find to serve as the armed honor guard for the delivery of the ashes, and even (to the chagrin and irritation of the Marine Corps detachment aboard) took the biggest Marines and made them wear sailors uniforms (you can see below, wearing the flat hats!) 
Anyway, it was a big to-do, the crew was treated on liberty by the Japanese quite well, but in the formal dinner party of all the ships officers held with prominent Japanese Naval officers, there was real tension and barely disguised (sometimes not disguised) hostility by the Imperial Japanese Navy representatives towards their American counterparts.
But to the point of our discussion of Japanese women...one US Navy officer later said (I have to paraphrase, I don't have it exactly) "I could never understand how the Japanese women could be so beautiful and sweet, and the Japanese men could be such sons-of-bitches!"
Well, on August 9, 1942, Japanese sent the USS Astoria to the bottom of Ironbottom Sound during the Battle of Savo Island. Quite an ironic turnaround there.