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I think there's a motte and a bailey involved, here. Yes the Japanese lost to the Americans despite relative hardness vs. softness. In many ways the hardness of their society made them brittle, like how their army and navy were constantly lying to each other. Hard societies tend to infight with higher stakes than soft societies, with resultant consequences. However, the flipside of this is that it's pretty undeniable that pound-for-pound the Japanese got more value out of their limited resources than the Americans did. A theoretical Japan that had all of America's advantages (like sources of oil deep inside their own territory and a massive industrial output) could quite possibly have won that war.
The core concept of the Fremen 'mirage' is that a poor society can conceal deep reserves of human capital and a highly militarized society with great asabiyyah can punch far above its weight class. If anything the Japanese are a bad example; they were not poor but quite rich, not underdeveloped but the most developed of the Asian nations, and their asabiyyah was inconsistent at best.
The core example is the Arabs. They swept out of their desert, conquered the Middle East and North Africa, and pushed into Europe before ultimately being pushed back. Their apparent lack of wealth and technology belied the fact that their lifestyle had instilled them with immense martial prowess. Their horses were among the best in the world, and the Western European powers would later go out of their way to import Arabian horses to breed at home. Most of all they had such great asabiyyah that asabiyyah is, in fact, an Arabic word.
Dune is based on Lawrence of Arabia, which is a story about a British army officer supporting the Arabic revolt against the Ottoman Turks. He talks about 'desert power' as an analogy to sea power, and this same metaphor is used in Dune to compare Caladan (a water planet, like how Britain is an island) to Arrakis (a desert planet, like how Arabia is a desert). The Ottoman Sultan was called the Padishah, which is why the Emperor in Dune is called the Padishah Emperor (and why his name is Shaddam).
This is not meant to be subtle. The first point of comparison for the Fremen should be the Arabs.
But when the Arabs built their empire they did it by steamrolling the (Eastern) Romans and the Persians who had a plenty of martial prowess and whose troops were well battle-hardened, precisely because they had spent hundreds of years butting heads against each other.
The Arabs were highly united and driven when doing their conquests, but that's because they had just been united by a fresh new mission-oriented religion, not any inherent "desertness". Before Mohammed, and during the early parts of his career, the Arabs were notably disunited and prone to clannish infighting.
Also, the Fremen are Chechens.
I didn't say they were driven by their 'desertness'. The 'desert power' analogy is actually about how the Arabs (and the Fremen in Dune for that matter) were actually very sophisticated in military technology, not about poverty causing strength. Just as Britain dominated through its ability to attack anyone anywhere and then retreat behind their oceans to avoid counterattack, the Arabs could do the same in their deserts with their cavalry-centric armies and survival expertise.
The Arab rise to power coincided with the Eastern Roman Empire switching to a much more cavalry-centric army. At that time in military history, the vast infantry armies of antiquity were giving way to the cavalry-centric armies and armored knights of the middle ages. Infantry powers like Rome were supplanted by cavalry powers like the Arabs. Later the Arabs would sweep through Spain and only be stopped by another cavalry-centric army of Franks led by Charles Martel, which led in turn through the course of military evolution to the heavy cavalry-centric armies of France which dominated Europe. They were only supplanted in their supremacy by the Mongols, at which point cavalry peaked and went into decline with the rise of mass levies, pike-and-shot, and artillery warfare.
This is, in fact, what I am referring to when I talk about asabiyyah. A defining factor of the 'Fremen mirage' is that the barbarians are internally united by a common desire to conquer the wealthy civilized nations. This was true of both the Arabs in real life (Muslims have a notoriously us-vs-them mentality) and the Fremen in Dune (with their Green Paradise).
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They also did it in the wake of a plague, when the Romans and Persians were both exhausted by an extensive war and the rest of Europe/Mediterranean was in the midst of the worst political upheaval since the bronze age collapse.
I agree that noone was weak or "lazy" here. I don't think "hardness" played much of a role if any.
A better example would probably be the Mongols conquest of China.
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