Doesn't matter, we can still talk about Western culture (meaning mostly Anglosaxon in this context, and including Europe in others) and Japanese culture.
It's about defaults and majority/average preferences, not about "every single one does this" and it gets tiring to remind people otherwise, as if they don't know.
It does matter, because the conversation is inaccurate at best when one tries to generalize their own personal experiences as the whole Western spectrum. Dating in Alabama is quite different from Rhode Island. We don't hold enough information to understand "defaults" or "majorities". Heck, we are at Hacker News, hardly the epicenter of social butterflies.
So even if there was such a thing as default, we wouldn't know it. Let alone from a foreign country that most natives don't speak a foreign language. How many Japanese relationships did you have to form such knowledge on the majority?
Last, but not least, it is not tiring to remind people to reframe the conversation. It is healthy and constructive.
I won't argue with your perspective on Western culture. I neither agree nor disagree.
But, I will say that to a greater degree than you perhaps would imagine, Japanese people by and large do know what to expect from other Japanese in minute contextual detail. And with that knowledge, they try very hard to meet others' expectations.
>It does matter, because the conversation is inaccurate at best when one tries to generalize their own personal experiences as the whole Western spectrum. Dating in Alabama is quite different from Rhode Island.
What matters for the analogy to be useful is if there are two big clusters in east and west. Not regional differences within the clusters, or between individuals.
It's about defaults and majority/average preferences, not about "every single one does this" and it gets tiring to remind people otherwise, as if they don't know.