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This article is from the American misconceptions about Japan FAQ, by Tanaka Tomoyuki ez074520@dilbert.ucdavis.edu with numerous contributions by others.

MYTH: Japanese are completely different from Americans and ... inscrutable

THE TRUTH: not so different.

To me, Japanese and American peoples are more alike than different:
both are hard-working, practically-minded, and socially and
politically conservative. (Japan and the USA are among the most prominent of the Western capitalist nations.)

---- (2.5.1) Benedict-Reischauer model of Japan as the polar opposite of the USA, which has dominated American academia and journalism.

However, American media and academia like to depict Japanese as completely different (diametrically opposite) and "inscrutable".
This has been a consistent pattern in the Western depiction of Japan for centuries, culminating in Ruth Benedict's "Chrysanthemum and the Sword", which contrasted the Western culture of "sin" vs the Japanese culture of "shame". Another common contrast is "individualist" vs "group-oriented" (see the quote from Reischauer below).

(Japanese authors are similarly guilty in this respect.
--- NAKANE Chie's "tate shakai no ningen kankei" (English tr.
"Japanese society") contrasts the Western "horizontal"
society vs the Japanese "vertical" society.
--- DOI Takeo's "amae no kouzou" (English tr. "The anatomy of
dependence") exaggerates the differences between the
cultures.
If AMAE really is a unique Japanese concept that can not
be translated into English, why not use AMAE in the
title of the English version?)

Even Karel van Wolferen (Dutch journalist who showed his excellent understanding of the Japanese society in [book] "The enigma of Japanese power") exclaims, "Inside Japan, nothing is quite as it seems." (Printed on the dust jacket of the book, Macmillan edition) I suppose this is due to journalistic exaggeration and appeal to the exotic.
In [book] "Human Universals" Donald E. Brown describes how
anthropologists tend to over-emphasize the differences when
reporting customs of "exotic" peoples. He beautifully illustrates this by taking a scene describing a foreign custom where the reporter was trying to highlight the differences, and noting the underlying commonalities in that very description.