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Tazzy, if you are talking about rise of Imperial Japan after Meiji restoration period then you are correct, there was no EU then, but if we are talking about rise of Japan after World War II, in the 70's and 80's, then EU has already taken shape by then.
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No, I'm talking about the modern rise of Japan.
The EU wasn't formed until 1993. The EEC had been around for a few decades before then but it was a very different and far looser body, more NAFTA than the modern EU. In the 80s most European countries still had a major independant streak and there was nobody who thought of them as one body the way many do today.
I totally 100% disagree that China has an unlimited supply of cheap labour. The entire point of what the Chinese government is doing is trying to make China richer, the Chinese people want an improved quality of life, they want to live like westerners. For this they need higher wages.
Already you can see problems emerging from this in China as companies are beginning to move inland, away from the expensive coastal cities to the poorer inland cities. China has a choice- get rich and lose out on being the world's source of cheap labour or continue being the place for cheap labour and continue being poor. I don't think it takes a genius to guess which one China is going for.
China's population gives it some advantages yes. It also however brings it a lot of disadvantages. Its a lot easier to drag a few million people out of poverty and create a stable developed nation with them than to do the same with a billion. Hell, there aren't enough resources in the world for the whole of China as it currently stands to be as rich as the west or Japan- IMO this is going to have to wait a good century or so when China's population has halved.