My guess it has something to do with Japanese culture constantly discouraging individualism. If you're raised to be a cog in the machine and make sure you children will be cogs in the machine then that machine can run for a very long time.
There is a lot of individual creativity in Japan. How much you care for the interest of group (family/company/nation) is different from how much expressiveness there is at a personal level. The fomer being higher doesn't mean the latter is low.
Also, for a group to be resilent, there actually needs to be a lot of creativity at in its members as otherwise it will collapse when it meets challenges.
> There is a lot of individual creativity in Japan. How much you care for the interest of group (family/company/nation) is different from how much expressiveness there is at a personal level. The fomer being higher doesn't mean the latter is low.
Could you elaborate on this some more? It was my understanding people were discouraged from even dressing different, for example.
