@VF89 It's not as simple as saying "Japanese culture". Never has been, really. You can say a culture is all about the communal and the family and zero about the individual, but individuals still exist in them. There are always stories
in those cultures about star-crossed romances--often doomed, but the individual heart's longing remains a thing. And the "family" everything is for often turns out to be about the benefit of
a few individual members of that family, which leads to resistance, again, within the culture. And every culture has a surprising amount of overlap when it comes to basic questions of fairness and justice, so it's never totally counter to a culture to point out that something which appears to be a manifestation of the culture is fundamentally unfair. And like, consider Musashi--dude was totally individualistic, broke lots of rules, wandered around mostly outside the social structure, and is Japan's biggest hero ever. So Japanese culture isn't and never was monolithic. There are always tensions and contradictions, countercurrents and resistance.
It's the same in North America--we have resistances to the culture of hyperindividual selfishness and corporate greed.