>What's with the west's pathalogical obsession with Japan and Japanese?

The first thing to point out is that this goes both ways which goes a long way to explain why Japan is more accessible. As someone who is German, the amount of anime that features vaguely German settings and names (sometimes extremely grammatically broken) for no good reason has always been funny to me. Influential popular media figures like Kojima are obsessed with Western pop culture in their own right, etc.

Even the more literary or nationalistic Japanese cultural figures are often steeped in European culture, see Yukio Mishima. You can recognize Kafka in Kobo Abe's books, so as a Western reader it's both different and familiar. Chinese culture is harder to get into and in particular traditional Chinese culture is more impenetrable yet.