In the late Edo and early Meiji periods, Western visitors to Japan often complained that the Japanese were careless about time. A Dutch naval engineer in Japan at the end of the shogunate was one of them.
The 2001 essay collection Chikoku no tanjō (The Birth of Tardiness) studies how this changed. Most of its essays discuss systems introduced in the Meiji period. A co-organizer of the research writes that time discipline took hold fast in modern institutions such as railways, factories and schools, but spread to the rest of life only after World War II.
Within about 150 years, the old complaint had turned into its opposite.