As a person who is Swiss and has lived a while in Japan, everyone says “Heidi”. I think Heidi/the alps is the biggest stereotype of Switzerland to japanese people, not banking.
Same here, but I've noticed that, at least from my circle here, people don't know too much about countries in Europe. Not that they really should, I guess. I'm from the Czech Republic, and usually I should point it on a map for people to understand better where it is.
Especially during and just following the bubble economy in Japan, a lot of people would go to France and get completely shocked. They largely went to Paris and we're shocked that it was not romance, fantasy, and love, but regular Parisians. There is a word in japanese パリ病 (Paris sickness) to describe the disillusionment of it all.
Do you know why that is? I never really thought about that, but as a child, before i knew what anime or manga is, we went to france a lot on vacation. Back then the only anime i knew was heidi and drangonball, and that was before the frieza saga even aired. But there, kids my age had dbz video games, a ton of mangas and anime. I bought some mangas and was blown away to read the story where golu goes super saiyan.
And even now, i deadass wouldn't know where i would buy a manga, but if i cross the french border and go to a normal supermarket, they have a whole isle just manga.
The biggest tvshow aimed for kids switched from French cartoon to anime because it was cheaper ,so it influenced a lot the kids and our pop culture. That s one big reason , there are surely other factors but I don't know them.
I don't think so tbh. Japan did a lot of horrendous things back then, but it's still not nearly as infamous as Nazi Germany at that time. The only time I hear or see any mention of that is usually when someone praises anything Japanese and the other person wants to show how extremely highly educated they are by noting that Japan did something terrible more than half a century ago.
America downplayed it because it launched straight into the Cold War alliance propaganda and remembering it would be inconvenient while trying to build alliances against China and Russia.
I don't know what Germany teaches about the invasion of China and the occupation of Korea and the Pacific islands, but I can certainly see why both East and West Germany would teach it in school.