Japan projects soft power as a place that has fine crafts, allows different ideas to flourish and creates bleeding edge technology. Learning Japanese is seen as a high prestige activity due to that.

Nevermind that in reality it’s a misogynistic and tradition oriented society that is extremely xenophobic. Cars! Anime! Vidja! Caligraphy!

Due to the authoritarian CCP, and being a source of the cheapest, lowest quality goods, china does not have that kind of reputation.

Even though shitloads of electronics, consumer technology manufacturing, and etc are produced in china.

Both sides of both coins are true. However, the reputation is not the same.