"Look at all the foreign-things Japan is now famous for: Japanese Whiskey, Denim, bread making, Japanese curry, etc."

I think all your examples are terrible (bread) or overpriced (Japanese Whiskey). There are also a lot of places that are pretty crap in Japan like restaurants where they clearly don't really care.

Compare to Italy that wherever you go everything seems really high quality. I was in a gas station in the middle of nowhere and I had a really great cappuccino for example.