Huh! Vagaries of geography, I spose. In my mind, anything geographically east of India is the "far east." I realize that Japan's a pretty-well "westernized" country in many ways, but for reasons I don't really understand, western Europe (to the west of the old Iron Curtain) and both North and South America are generalized as the "western world."
I guess it all depends where one's sitting.