[Panoramix]

Just to make it clear: perfect and perfectionist are very, very different things. You cannot paraphrase one into the other at all.

In order to asses whether it's an stereotype or not, we have to set up some kind of measure of perfectionism. Otherwise we have to rely on anecdotes. My anecdotes, having lived in Germany and very briefly in Japan, match that of the original post: I was continuously baffled with the attention to detail displayed everywhere in Tokyo. It's just in a whole different level. And that of course does not make them perfect (what does that even mean?). Whether this attitude historically stems from Europe, is a second order tangent.

Your argument seems to be: Japanese are not particularly perfectionist (no more than Colombians, Danish, Turkish for example). But if they were, it's because they took it from the Germans. I found this confusing.

[hga]

Indeed, look at the domains of civilian aviation (Japan Airlines Flight 123, where the sound caused by an incorrect repair was ignored for years, and let's not even get into how face is more important than saving lives, see also the Kobe earthquake response) and nuclear power.

I realized long before Fukushima that Japan's nuclear safety culture was impossibly awful, and I'm afraid I have to agree with those who say they have no business running serious reactors.