Japan was sealed off from the world by the Tokugawa Shogunate and only opened back up relatively recently (~150 years ago). So yeah, their culture is kinda built different to the rest of Asia, having evolved for centuries in isolation. They are still prone to exceptionalism: one story goes that European ski equipment manufacturers had difficulty exporting their skis to Japan in the 1960s because of a widespread belief that "Japanese snow is different" and Western skis would not work on it. So while the Chinese readily learn English in order to conduct trade with Westerners, there is an unconscious expectation among Japanese that potential foreign trade partners learn Japanese.